On this show, the SOTT Talk Radio hosts went biblical, but with a strong revisionist bent.

The idea that a man named Jesus Christ, born of a virgin, performer of miracles, betrayed and crucified and declared to be the 'son of god', actually existed during the Roman Empire in the area of modern-day Palestine is the subject of long and often heated debate.

Historians and archeologists are adamant that there is no historical evidence for the existence of such a person, Christians on the other hand, just know in their hearts that Jesus lived and died to take away our sins (or debts). So what's the deal?

The skinny is that, while it isn't exactly widely known (to say the least), there is evidence to suggest that the details of the life of Jesus Christ were in fact pinched from another famous J.C. of the same era. So, seriously, who was on first here?

Have a listen as author and historian Laura Knight-Jadczyk takes us through the evidence that suggests 'Christ' may in fact have been Caesar...

Joe: Hi, and welcome to SOTT Talk Radio. This week we're going biblical, but with a strong revisionist bent. The idea that a man called Jesus Christ, born of a virgin, performer of miracles, betrayed and crucified, and declared to be the son of God, actually existed during the Roman Empire, in the area of modern-day Palestine, is the subject of long and often heated debate. Historians and archaeologists are adamant that there is no historical evidence for the existence of such a person. Christians, on the other hand, just know in their heart that Jesus lived and died to take away their sins, or debts, as the case may be. So what's the deal?

Well, as you're going to find out, the skinny is that, while it isn't exactly widely known, to say the least, there is evidence to suggest that the details of the life of Jesus Christ were, in fact, pinched from another famous JC of the same era. So seriously, who's on first here? Joining me this week are the usual suspects: Jason, Niall, and Pierre, and, also, author and historian, Laura Knight-Jadczyk.

So, Laura, getting back to that general question there: seriously, who's on 1st here?

Laura: Ah- ha! Well, you've asked a question that uh...

Joe: ...that's gonna be answered later on?

Laura: Well, yeah, because I think I would rather describe how I came to the idea and then found some confirmation. Describing how I got to the idea is going to take a little bit of time, but I can assure you, it's pretty interesting...so, it's not going to be boring...but, what I also had planned to do tonight was talk about a few other things, including one of my own recent little discoveries during the course of doing the research for the next volume of Secret History. It all, kind of, ties in together, but even before that, I want to tell everybody some things about history, the practice of history, how history is done, how it's been done, and some of the things that we're up against when we try to read sources about history or historians interpreting those sources.

Obviously, everything that happens around us on a daily basis in the political sphere, in the social sphere, is history in the making. If you think about it, the old saying, "The victors write the history" is never more true than when it's being written as you experience it, or live it, or observe it on a daily basis, assuming you're paying attention. For example, what will historians of the future have to say about the assassination of John Kennedy? There is the official version, and then there are all of the works by alternative historians (or what they call "conspiracy theorists," and I'm going to say something about that in a second) that completely contradict the official version. What will survive in the future? This is, kind of, the dilemma that we're looking at here, and any discussion about Jesus or any other famous person in history.

What if, in the future, the powers that be decide that it's a very, very anti-political, or it's anti-stability to the society, for any of these books about the assassination of John Kennedy being a conspiracy by the government to continue to exist? They launch a campaign for house-to-house searches, library searches, have people turn each other in for possessing such books, and they eliminate all of the books

about any other idea concerning the assassination of John Kennedy (other than the established, authoritarian position). What, then, will future historians have to work with? That's an interesting question, isn't it? The same could be said about the events of 9/11/2001. Suppose, at some point, it's decided that conspiracy theorists are stirring up the population against their constituted authorities;
and all of the individuals who do not buy into the party line, or who have written books or articles or what-not, are rounded up, gotten rid of, or made to swear some kind of oath of allegiance? Their books are searched out, burned, destroyed. What, then, will future historians say about the events of 9-11? The fact is that those kinds of things appear to have happened in the past regarding our real history. I'm going to show you a piece of evidence that I have found...that this is the case.

Pierre: ...just a quick note. This re-writing of history, according to the victors, is obvious when we think about the example you give. It works, right now, in real time. In an uniformitarian world, imagine that in between, you have major destructions that destroy most of the witness[es], most of the books, most of the old traditions. This way, re-writing is even more easily performed...

Jason: ...but even worse...because, of course, we're talking about this: what are historians going to think two thousand years from now about 9-11? Books, without a lot of care...they don't have a very long life. Paper can tend to rot, get damp, or whatever it is. Colours fade, inks fade, so someone would have to really, really work hard to preserve a book across that amount of time. The way that texts in the past have survived is that people copied them to new parchments and new scrolls and new books. These people, obviously, sometimes got really bored with what whatever some person was saying and then tried to summarize it...so again, there's that: how people summarize the assassination of JFK...

Laura: ...and what about copying errors...translation errors?

Pierre: ...or the bad translation, the evolution of language?

Laura: All of these things come into play in the transmission of history. We are faced with revision as it happens, revision after the fact, destruction that is unplanned and unforeseen, destruction that is deliberate....and, of course, if you have a discontinuity in history, such as a period of extreme stress on the planet when the population is greatly reduced, institutions fail; infrastructure fails. The death rate is like 80-90%...these events have happened in the last two thousand years, by the way. Then you have very few people left who are literate, and the ones who are left are basically free to do what they wish with whatever manuscripts are available...so those are all the problems that face the historians...

Joe: ...I was going to say something there, which was just that it wouldn't be so bad that... that kind of thing happened, particularly the destruction of...you know, the kind of unforeseen destruction, cosmic catastrophes or cataclysms (or whatever)...if all of the lies and twisting that went on at the time were wiped out with the destruction or the cataclysm...but, the real problem is that...somehow...

Laura: ...the lies persist.

Joe: ...yeah, today, we're basing a lot of our history and a lot of our beliefs and values (and all that kind of stuff) on a religion that comes from two thousand years ago, that includes all that revision and changes at the time (most likely a cataclysm or two along the way)...but, still, we're saddled with it!

Laura: ...but, we're convinced---or, some of us are convinced---that it's true. Well, let me present my two particular examples here: one of them is another person's discovery; the second one is my own discovery.

The first one is what is called "The Edward II Conspiracy". Now, you're probably wondering why I'm bringing up Edward II, when we're going to be talking about Jesus, ultimately...but, bear with me because this is important. I hope that most of you know the story of Edward II, but, just in case you don't, I'm going to give you a little, quick recap...

Joe: [Edward II] of England?

Laura: ...yeah, Edward II, King of England. I grew up knowing the story of Edward II...because the account of what he did was so horrible, it would give anybody a nightmare. He was king of England from 1307 until he was deposed by his wife, Isabella, in 1327. Isabella was the daughter of the king of France, and she was called the "she-wolf" because...after she went off to France (where her brother was king) and hooked up with Roger Mortimer, Edward's sworn enemy (who was one of the few people in history who ever escaped from the Tower of London, by the way), together, they got help from continental nobles; assembled a small army; went back to England; and took over. They did this with almost unanimous support of the people, so, obviously, at the time, Isabella and Mortimer were not seen as predators or wolves...

The next thing they did was put Edward [since they were not willing to take the step of committing regicide (that would have been a very bad thing, and it would have set a very bad precedent; it probably would have excited the people against them because it would have been considered a sacrilege--because the king's person was holy) ]...so they didn't kill him--they put him into custody with some people who were supposed to watch him. He was imprisoned; he had style and comfort; but somewhere along the way, he was allegedly killed.

How was he killed, and why does this thing stick in my mind? Well, since he was pretty much a flaming homosexual, the people claimed that he had been killed in a particularly horrendous way that was supposed to be suited to his proclivities: he was killed by having a hot poker--I mean...red-hot [as] in having been heated in the fire--inserted into his anus, and stirred around so that all of his innards would be basically cooked while he was alive. The story said that his screams could be heard all over the countryside (and that's the short version)...

So a few years later, Isabella and Edward's son (who was the nominal king), who was being "guided" (and I have that in quotes) by Isabella and Mortimer, was feeling a little bit hostile that his mother's lover had killed his father--go figure...he got some friends together, and they snuck into the castle through an underground passage; confronted Roger Mortimer; took him prisoner; tried him for murder, treason (whatever); and he, too, died a most horrible death. On that one, you can just think [of] William Wallace and the movie Braveheart. (Wallace, by the way, was murdered by Edward I ["Longshanks"], the father of Edward II and the grandfather of Edward III.) So, they were keeping the family traditions alive there)...

Or course, I knew that Edward II was, at the very least, bisexual (even though he and Isabella had several children together). His male friends, his lovers (Piers Gaveston and, later, Hugh le Despencer), scandalized the country and took over the government. This is one of the reasons that the people were not terribly unhappy when Isabella and Mortimer came and took over. He allowed his lovers to dominate him and use him to enrich themselves at the expense of the entire country. So they, the two lovers, actually come across as complete[ly] rapacious psychopaths, with Edward himself being kind of an innocent victim of his proclivities (which was not really a sin as far as I'm concerned)...

But, anyway, knowing all of that doesn't make [right] the way Edward died...this was, actually, kind of the key to the puzzle (if you really think about it): the fact that he was accused of having been murdered this way (or that Roger Mortimer was accused of having this done; and that these stories were spread around); and it was these stories that prompted his son to gather his friends to go in and arrest Mortimer and try him for treason and execute him in that horrible way...

So, that sounds like the story: that's history, right? Everybody's been teaching that story for, well, basically, since the fourteenth century. That's history for six hundred years...

[But,] Guess what?

It's not true!!!

Joe: ...o-oh-hh??...it was a fairy story???

Laura: It was a fairy story...

Joe: ...pretty gruesome one, but...

Laura: ...yeah, it was pretty horrible...and it's only been discovered, in recent years, that it wasn't true.

This is where the two different types of historiography come into play: there's the historians who write history because they go and interview witnesses (and they read other peoples' histories and write histories based on those histories); and then there's what they call an antiquarian.

Antiquarians dig stuff up, go around and take tracings off monuments, collect local lore and stories, legends, myths...they go and collect coins; they examine coins; they go into archives; and they...I mean, some people get really obsessed: there was one guy, a pretty famous historian of the antiquarian variety, who spent every summer of his vacation ([from] teaching at a big university in the U.S.) in the archives (in the court archives in London) studying financial transactions.

The fact is...that it was one of these antiquarian types who solved this interesting little mystery.

It seems that there was a letter written by an unimpeachable source (the Italian bishop of Vercelli) stating that Edward II actually was helped to escape, went to Italy, became a hermit, and lived the rest of his life in exile. This is called the Fieschi Letter.

It was discovered in 1878, in Montpelier, France, by a French archivist in an official register dating before 1368. Now, it didn't get a lot of attention until just recently, but it was discovered that far back. (The letter has been tested, and it is not a forgery.) The letter contains accurate details that few people knew at the time and was written long before the accepted accounts of the murder were pinned by the propagandists (who were out to get Mortimer).

Historian, Ian Mortimer, (who, by the way, is no relation to Roger), following the financial accounts and administrative documents of the reign of Edward III (he's one of these antiquarian-type historians), demonstrates in a book, rather effectively and convincingly, that Edward III probably did receive this

letter and that he met with his father in Germany later (this, of course, being after he had executed Mortimer for the supposed murder). This was the background to certain changes in his behaviour and attitude.

Edward II, obviously, was content for his son to be king (probably because he knew that the whole country had turned against him because of his "vile" sexual proclivities and his tendency to want to be dominated in any relationship--which is what had resulted in the almost complete collapse of the royal administration while Gaveston and le Despencer were ruling; he, also, probably realized--and this is just my opinion--he could pursue his urges more discreetly and with less opposition as a private person under the guise of a "hermit," that is, in a religious institution.) [Chuckling]

Joe: ...best place for him...I mean...he'd be welcome through the doors these days...

Laura: It was important, at the time, for Edward III to protect the reputation of his mother, Isabella [who, after Mortimer's execution, nearly lost her mind--based on the royal records of the Exchequer (because the payments to various types of doctors and so forth, for her care and her confinement, were listed in the books)].

Nobody had a clue for over six hundred years.

What is remarkable about this is the fact that this letter was found (and the truth revealed) at all. How much more of our history is exactly like this (concealed, covered up, and the truth never comes out at all)??

Of course, some old-school historians who really believe in the mainstream history that we've been listening to for the last six hundred years, criticized this conclusion stringently; and they criticised Ian Mortimer's methods because he's there digging through the records of who was spending what money in the court, and what it's being spent for (which is kind of how he found it). Edward III had spent some money on this trip to Germany (that he had paid some money to this unknown person - who, it, apparently, turns out was his father under an assumed name--who had come to spend time with him in Germany before going back to his Italian "monk-ly"cell.

Anyway, if you want to know the details, you can read [them], in Mortimer's book, The Greatest Traitor, as well as Alison Weir's book, Isabella: She-wolf of France, Queen of England...I think, after you read these books, you'll agree that it's time to put a period ['.'] to this terrible story and acknowledge that people in power do a lot of things that the rest of us don't know about (without certain accidents of fate, such as the discovery of the Fieschi Letter). [Otherwise,] we have no way, whatsoever, of knowing what is truth and what is lies.

The point of this story (is that): when studying history, everything can appear on the surface to follow a fairly logical cause-event process; and the history can be powerfully influenced by the propaganda of the times [such as / including the story of the horrible murder of Edward II as possibly true...that puts Isabella and Mortimer in a particular light (which, it seems obvious now, that they did not deserve to have cast on them)].

Jason: ...but served the purposes...

Laura: ...it served the agenda of the time...it also makes it obvious that even the people of the time - or the times - can be influenced by propaganda to act in certain ways that they later learn were not appropriate.

Undoubtedly, Edward III, exposed to the horrible rumours about the death of his father, got worked up to the point that he was willing to cause grave psychological damage to his mother and destroy her happiness (by arresting her beloved and having him executed).

Now, I'm not defending Isabella and Mortimer (because both of them had axes to grind in the situation); but the shadow of this event spread over the entire period. And it is difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff when one already has an opinion of how bad they were (because they were responsible for such a horrifying act against a person of the lawful king).

Isabella and Mortimer obviously did save England from the ravages of the le Despencers. And who knows how history would have played out if the two of them had continued to rule for a bit longer before Edward III came of age? Things may not actually have been that different, except that a truly awful crime against an innocent Mortimer would not have been committed.

But then, perhaps the later realization of the fact, that he had, in fact, executed an innocent man, a man loved by his mother, affected Edward III in a positive way (making him more thoughtful and willing to wait for more data before making decisions). Maybe his realization of his mistake made him a better man and a better king.

So when we research history, we have to pay close attention, because there are not just two sides to a story. Sometimes there is a truth that hides behind all the smoke and mirrors. And when we come across odd questions, dangling threads that make us aware that something isn't right, we need to sit up and take notice...which leads me to my own little discovery...

Joe: ...ye-e-ss???

Laura: ...mmm-yes...[smiling]...ye-e-ss...

This is going to be a little bit of a recitation of my research. Those of you who read the last volume of Secret History (Comets and the Horns of Moses)...I hope you've read it...if you haven't, maybe some of the things I'm going to say isn't gonna to make a lot of sense. But the fact is, as I was merrily going along writing...you know, more or less a chronology of the history of the collapse of the Roman Empire...which is actually much later than what I ended up talking about in that book, because I wanted to set the collapse of Rome up as the model... and I wanted to cover it fairly quickly, because it was going to be the model of the collapse of the Egyptian Empire (which is where we were going to find Moses)...so half the book was going to be the collapse of Rome, and the other half was gonna be Moses...it was going to be one book, and that was going to be IT...

[Laughter in the background]

Laura: ...as some of you know, things just haven't turned out that way. And that's because I had the experience of finding some of those odd questions dangling as I was going through the research...and the first question came along. I had written about Constantine and his experience with what was probably a cometary body that caused him to convert the empire to Christianity...and this was just

prior, by about, oh what...

Pierre: ...300 [AD]?

Laura: No, I'm talking about how many years before the collapse--that was in 312...

Pierre: ...less than 200...

Laura: ...yeah, less than 200 years before everything really went to...so, Christianity was kind of like in place and growing and manifesting all over the place when everything went kaflooey, and...

Jason: ...I'd like to point out that it heralded the collapse of the Roman Empire--apparently, God couldn't save them...

Pierre: ...for some reference, we were talking about the timeline...roughly, for the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, circa 590 AD...

Laura: ...yeah, so the thing was...there I was, going along through this chronology...and what I was trying to do was...I was trying to find what the chroniclers of the time had to say about anything...because it seemed to me that Christianity was a religion that grew up and replaced the old ways at a time of climate and environmental collapse, which appears to have been the same thing that was happening during the 18th Dynasty in Egypt. Everyone knows, I guess, that around 1600 BC, the volcano, Thera, erupted and blew, basically, the Mediterranean civilization to bits, along with other things that were going on. Uh, it's a little harder to find out exactly what happened then, if you don't have a model. But, anyhow, there was a change of religion at that time, too. So it seemed to me that when there's environmental stress, when there is cometary activity in the sky...you know, people started thinking about God. And it's very easy to change religions.

In a certain sense, it's kind of like what happened on 9-11. I don't want to beat a dead horse here, but there was something...happened in the sky, caused a whole lot of stress for a lot of people (thanks to the efforts of the mainstream media), and everybody was converted to the belief that 19 Arab terrorists, guided by some poor guy on a dialysis machine in a cave in Afghanistan (or Tora Bora, or wherever the heck he was), overcame the defenses of the greatest nation on earth. I mean, that's a pretty wild kind of belief, don't you think?

But, anyway...

Jason: ...sounds kind of ridiculous, when you put it that way...

Laura: ...yeah, so the thing is...that there I was, going along, and I was looking at these things...and then I thought I would, well, I'm just gonna back up just a little bit...and, you know, I'm just gonna make this really complete....

So I was looking at all of the historians of the period...and there's quite list of them, quite a list of chronicles of the period prior to, and, more or less, during the collapse.

For example, there's...

- Zacharias Rhetor, who wrote from 465 - 553
- John Malalus (491 - 578)
- Cassiodorus (485 - 585)
- John Lydus
- Procopius of Caesarea
- Jordanus
- John of Ephesus
- Pseudo-Zachariah
- Theophanes of Byzantium
- Agathias
- Evagrius Scholasticus
- Menander Protector
- The Chronicon Paschale (which was kind of like compilation of all of the other historians...was put out between 600 and 627)

Then there's the Zuqnin Chronicle (which came out probably no later than 775 -- it, too, is a compilation of all these previous historians).

There's Dionysius of Tel Mahre (818 - 845).

These are getting late, but they are chroniclers who compiled from the ancient historians.

Constantine Porphyrogennetos (who was, by the way, the Roman Emperor).

Then there's a book called the Souda (which has excerpts and little synopses of all the manuscripts that Porphyrogennetos had in the library)

And then there's Michael the Syrian (who was much, much later, but he preserved some excerpts that none of the others preserved)

Now all of these chroniclers belonged to the Eastern Empire [(based in) Constantinople...because, of course, after Constantine had his vision (after he had certain experiences in Rome), he decided to go live in Constantinople--that's how the history is told (one wonders, of course, if he decided to go to live in Constantinople because this cometary impact--that, by the way, has been more or less confirmed for the northern part of Italy at the time--made the weather or the environment in Italy a little less salubrious than one might have wished...in other words, were things falling apart, things going haywire already, when Constantine moved the capitol of the empire?)...we have the history that we're told, but as we have just seen from the history of Edward II, it's not always so cut-and-dried--there's a lot of things that get changed around.]

Pierre: ...to bring some life in the account, bring some more variety and some more life....

Laura: ...okay, bring some more life in the account....

Pierre: ...and one strange tendency among the chroniclers...from the chroniclers...is that they tended to all stop their activity around the year...

Laura: ...now, just...just, wait 'till I get to that! [laughing]

Just.......just...back off, buddy!

[background laughter]

Pierre: [mock sad] ...I'm going to be quiet now...

[lots of background laughter]

Laura: ...you're gonna give it all away--I gotta get the build-up here!!

...okay, so anyway, as I said, all these historians about...Pierre's allowed to have a little bit of leeway, here, because he's done all the translations for me from Michael the Syrian. Apparently Michael the Syrian does not exist in English, so you have to get it....and of course, none of us speak Syrian, ancient Syrian, or Old Syrian...so we have to refer to a French translation of the Old Syrian, which he then translates into English for me...so I can see what Michael the Syrian had to say.

But, in any event, what happened was, I was searching through all of these historians, their works, which I had to obtain, by hand...reading each one...and I was entering in the data in a table, year by year. When an event came up, I would enter it in with a...you know, I had... like a table with one column for the year...and then the rest was a cell where I put the information in--basically, a chronicle sort of arrangement.

Pierre: ...here there were listing...you were listing cataclysm[s]...

Laura: ...what I was looking for were evidences...bits of evidence for what was going on in the environment. In particular, I wasn't interested so much in political events (though, in some cases, I was including them because it struck me that really outrageous political events might have been inspired by the atmospheric or environmental events)...so I was listing...and I'll give you an idea of the kinds of things, because I have a little list here...

For example, "in the seventh year of king 'blah-blah-blah', on the eighth of the year 'blah-blah-blah': 'torrential downpours in the month of January'; 'flashes of lightning'; 'heavy claps of thunder'; 'streams, which run into the latter, were so swollen they rose above flood level'; 'the river'; 'lights in the skies'; 'some said they saw the heavens aflame'; 'the whole sky seemed to catch fire'; 'there appeared, at midnight, a multitude of rays'; 'portents appeared: rays of light were seen in the northern sky'; 'flashes of light'; 'blood rained from a cloud falling on the clothes of a number of people'; 'portents'; '[in] homes of people, vessels were discovered inscribed with unknown characters'; 'two centres of light'; 'objects of brilliance'; 'the walls of the city collapsed'; 'portents appeared a second time this year'; 'an earthquake'; 'people suffered from a terrible epidemic'; 'great numbers of them carried off'; 'a whole series of malignant diseases'; 'serious outbreak of plague'"...

I'm just flipping through this, but this is the kind of stuff....'a sound as if of trees crashing to the ground was heard throughout the whole region' (but it could hardly have been a tree, for it was audible for fifty miles!); 'Rays of light towards the north' again'; 'terrible storm battered down the vines and crops'; 'the city was burned by a great conflagration'; 'two islands in the sea were consumed by fire which fell from the sky' (They burned for seven whole days!); 'villages were burned by fire sent from heaven'; 'it took so swift a hold, that homesteads and threshing floors were still spread out...[were] reduced to ashes'...that sort of thing....so you see what I was looking for...

Now, historians of these ancient chronicles have, up to this very day, considered those kinds of things as hyperbole. They will say that there was a religious battle taking place...and each side was using this kind of ammunition against the other. The pagans were saying...they would write that "there was a fire from heaven and the church was destroyed...and that's proof that the Christians are bad"...and then the Christians would write, "well, there was an earthquake and the city was destroyed...and that's proof that the pagans are bad"...or, you know, "God is testing us to see if we can stay faithful"...and so on, and so forth...so, historians tend to say that these kind of things are either exaggerated, made up, misinterpreted, or what they're...or they're using metaphors, like "God smote the city." Instead of the historian...the chronicler, actually meaning...that the city got smitten in some way....

Jason: ...he didn't know how, and so attributed it to God...

Laura: ...yeah, he just attributed it to God...or that it could have been an economic collapse...and that was God smiting the city. They, actually, will argue these kinds of points. But I was taking this slightly different approach. I was going to accept these kinds of things as data to work with, which is why I was collecting it and entering it in my table.

Pierre: And there were very good reasons to take it as objective facts, because a) sometimes you have the account of the same event from two independent sources (that don't know each other), and they tell the same story; b) your archaeological evidence (in some cases of major destruction); and c) those very same chroniclers (that are accused of exaggerating actual events...meanwhile they were giving very accurate detail and objective accounts of political life).

Jason: ...which the historians do use when it suits their purposes.

Laura: They believe that...but then exclude the other. And there's another...there's another factor. How many did you have? You had three there? Okay, number four is the fact that Victor Clube, Mike Baillie, the other Bailey (and several astronomers) have determined that there have been periods of very active cometary flux in, and around, our planet (with many impacts and/or overhead explosions). There are many, many other astronomers who are collecting evidence that proves that this is the case: impacts of the Tunguska type, only bigger and meaner...impacts of the type that struck Russia in February of this year, only bigger and meaner...and I hope that everybody has watched the videos on that one (which, curiously, occurred three days after the release of my last volume, Comets and the Horns of Moses)...

Jason: ...which you can get on Amazon...Kindle format too. [Link]

Joe: Do we want to hear it?

Jason: I think we should hear the Arrow of Zeus, or...

Laura: ...okay, we're gonna hear the Thunderbolt of Zeus--this is what those people were hearing, only way worse...

Jason: ...minus the dog...

[Audio of fireball video]

Joe: It keeps going, but...

Jason: ...it keeps going. Yeah, that's the crazy thing. Now, imagine that you live 2000 years ago, or even like, 1,500 years ago...you have no experience of the concept of a missile...you see this bright thing streaming across the sky. There's some videos of it where you see this streamer...you see explosions...

Laura: ...you hear that . . .

Jason: ...bright flashes. You know that it's not lightning. It didn't sound like lightning or thunder. You know that the flashes aren't anything like that. There's no rain-clouds or anything like that. What are you going to ascribe that to? You don't know about missiles...you don't know about bombs or anything like this. You're gonna call it...what? The Thunderbolt of Zeus! The wrath of God! And if it destroys some building near you, what else could you say? Something came down...for which you have no concept of...and blew up a building, or set fire to everything. I mean...what else are you going to say?

Joe: Depending on regular...those kinds of things were...you would have kind of hoped that, after a few occasions, they would realize that they're rocks falling from the sky. At least for a while...someone smart enough to say, "this...and this and this...is rocks falling from the sky (from whatever source)".

Laura: Actually, there was one who did say that...and it was the teacher of Socrates...back in what, 380, uh, wasn't it 380 BC, or whatever...

Joe: ...yeah, but, of course, the potential....

Laura: ...and he was either put to death, or driven to suicide or something...because he said, "rocks fall from the sky." And then there was one that buried a city at Aegospotami...and I may have the date wrong, so ya'll don't hold me to dates here...

Joe: ...of course, the potential for that to be spun into the wrath of God is obviously very, very present...

Jason: But, look at how the government today uses the fear of terrorists, right? Would the individuals of that time...some opportunistic priest, priestly caste, or anyone...want to use the fear it caused to make some sort changes or reforms? I mean, would they capitalize on it...

Laura: ...to gain power!

Jason: ...and therefore encourage the interpretation "it's the wrath of God because you believe in so-and-so...and we're not in power!"

Joe: ...especially, if God had been associated, or was associated for a long time, with the emperor, or the king, or the ruling elite. This is not just God's wrath, but my wrath!" I mean, it can be co-opted.

Pierre: At this time, they were not totally naive about what was happening in the sky. In 500 AD, the Chinese had established a classification of comets, about a dozen different kinds of comets. Between 540 and 598 AD, chroniclers reported twelve...

Laura: But comets were different from things that entered the atmosphere and exploded, see? They, uh...

Joe: Could they not be...that if a comet was seen...and then there were fragments...

Laura: But that often happened. A comet was seen, and then fragments came...and of course, you know, the comet was a god...

Pierre: ...yeah, so there is specific mention of comets, but the twelve times between 540 and 590...but wrath of God...it might be a naive take on what's going on in the sky. It may be a sort of a...what they called "the mandate of heaven"...that we mentioned previously. At this time, there was a deep sense that political affairs and cosmic events were correlated. Michael the Syrian, in his chronicles, present[ed] the pages of his book the following way (there's two paragraphs): left column; right column. On the left column, he has the cosmic events, the natural phenomenon; and, on the right, he has the political events. He kept drawing correlations between political behaviour--and, in particular, political abuses committed by the leaders--and catastrophes...

Joe: So what you're saying is....

Pierre: ...so it's not necessarily a nice take on it. It might be that there is an understanding that there is a correlation...that God isn't happy...or the universe, or...

Joe: ...so they're not mutually exclusive...

Laura: ...which is why Michael the Syrian [Chronicle] hasn't been translated into English...

Jason: ...but, look right now: there's been a rash of disasters all over the world (flooding, and crop failures, and all this different stuff) and these sorts of signs and portents...

Laura: ...and the government...

Jason: ...what is the government doing right now?

Laura: The authorities...they're trying to cast all that activity onto more natural...I mean, for example...

Joe: ...it's, kind of, exactly the opposite of what was going on there. Today, when these kinds of things are happening...they are, and probably will try, to ascribe it all to either human causes--whereas in the past it was all celestial, heavenly, divine causes--...

Jason: ...well, what would Michael the Syrian write about...was it a two-mile-wide tornado? Ripping through and destroying houses and....what would he say about it? What would he...

Laura: ...and look at the political events that were going on at the same time! Look at the political events that are going on at the same time...that any of the events that the planetary.....

Joe: ...there were so many events...

Laura: Yeah!

Pierre: One of the fundamental differences between then and now--the cover-up now...and the take on it in the 6th century AD-- is that there was...there has been a major paradigm shift. The cosmology was different, and the past...the people were probably....

Laura: Science! The coming of science!

Pierre: ...closer to truth than we are now. With the advent of scientism, uniformitarianism, mechanistic universe, the clockwork model of the universe--where human activity is totally de-correlated from cosmic events--it opens the door to the cover-up we are hearing now...where all these manifestations of fundamental, cosmic change are covered up as man-made...unrelated, harmless events...and it's just the opposite: it's related; it's cosmically induced; and not harmless at all!

Joe: ...so the problem there is (you could think) that--in the past, people (not knowing the real source, let's say)--that there were comets...that there were rocks falling from the skies (kind of primitive); but actually (probably), people, back then, were better off (in a way) than we are today in the current system (because, back then, if they believed that rocks falling from the sky were, somehow, associated with corrupt leadership; and they got rid of the king on the basis of that; at least there's a chance for some people power and some positive change to be effected). But, today, nobody's going to blame the government for anything that's going on (even if that is the real cause). If there is some correlation between the corruption going today and cosmic catastrophe (or bringing cosmic catastrophe), no one's going to go cut off the head of whoever (or attack the elite on the basis of that). So, we're actually in a worse position than the people back then...

Pierre: ...nobody's blaming now. I think we might reach a point where the cover-up would be difficult to...

Laura: ...maintain?

Pierre: ...to maintain because human beings, despite all these indoctrinations, will realize they are facing events that are major, that are harmful, that are dangerous, and that have such a magnitude...that it's not man-made, and therefore it cannot be man-controlled...

Laura: And when that happens...

Pierre: ...the king is naked.

Laura: The king is naked.

Joe: ...I don't know...

Laura: Okay, so speaking of that, let's go and look at some of the things that I compiled from my collection of chroniclers. There was quite a little list of them. Now, remember, this is the Eastern Roman Empire. Remember, that like in 410 AD, supposedly, the barbarians came along and invaded the Western Roman Empire. They sacked Rome, and that was kind of the...almost the last you hear about anything going on in the Western Empire...not entirely the last, but for all intents and purposes, as far as the empire is concerned, that was kind of the last.

So, essentially, there were one hundred years from the time of Constantine and his comet, until you hear nothing further from the Western Empire. It, basically, has collapsed...and the only thing that's really left going on is the Eastern Empire (where the new capitol of Rome has been moved by Constantine)...and the Roman emperors continue to exist (although they're no longer in Rome). So, here's what the chroniclers [say] (and these are really short versions, really short--I'm not even gonna describe all of the details; just, you know, hit the high spots):

In the year 431, there were comets; grasshoppers; an earthquake [on] the 7th of April; and [on] the 6th of July, fire fell on Constantinople...

450 - 457: There's an earthquake in Tripoli...

457: Constantinople again: fire and ash fell from the sky. There was a huge earthquake in Psychikos...

474: An earthquake in Thrace...

491: Eclipse of the sun, plague of grasshoppers...

498: Earthquake [in] Nicopolis: springs of Avarne stopped flowing; the river, Euphrates, stopped its flow on the same day; an earthquake (Nicopolis was destroyed); plague of grasshoppers; fire on the north side of the sky...

500: Eclipse; ash falling from the sky; the walls of Edessa collapsed; November: there were signs in the sky; January: signs in the sky...

501: Famine; locusts; plague...

502: Earthquake [in] Ptolemais, Tyre, and Sidon; fire in the northern quarter of the sky; earthquake in Neocaesarea...

503: There was a sign like a spear visible in the sky...

504: An earthquake in Rhodes...

505: There was a massive killing of people, not explained, in Persian territory...

518: On the 9th of July, a comet, a "great spear in the sky"...

521: Dyrrachium: "the wrath of God fell" (That's all it said, but that's pretty suggestive)...

Joe: ...sounds pretty impressive.

Laura: In 522, Anazarbus: calamity from the wrath of God (...another 'wrath of God')...

524: Edessa was flooded (And this was reported by John Malalus, Pseudo-Zachariah, Zuqnin, Procopius, and Michael the Syrian)...

521: Was the great Antioch earthquake...

528: Earthquake...earthquake...Antioch earthquake (29th of November...so there was another one!)...

529: Amaseia and Pontus: wrath of God fell...

Jason: Can I make one small point? I mean, this is not like they had the internet (you know, where you can read about it)...like, oh, there was a 2.5 in such and such a place. Just imagine how big such a thing would have had to be, that somebody would have had to travel over to some other place and say, "Oh, by the way, there was an earthquake." And it would have been really big news. (So, it's not like we're tracking a 2.1 earthquake)...

Laura: These are city-destroying earthquakes, by the way. I told you that I'm just giving you the short version. These were city-destroying earthquakes, nation-destroying plagues of grasshoppers, city-destroying floods...

Jason: This information got to these people because of the people who were fleeing the area, the survivors, basically...

Laura: In 529, 'the wrath of God fell'; there was an earthquake in Corinth; the Euphrates was obstructed; there was a flood...

In 530, there was a great star in the western region...

531: Anazarbus, again, the metropolis of Cilicia, [is] overthrown (its fourth collapse). It was specified in the chronicle that it was the fourth time it had been destroyed in a fairly short period of time...

532: There was the Nike rebellion under the reign of Justinian...and there was a great shower of stars reported...there was an earthquake in Constantinople and an earthquake in Antioch...

In 535, there was the biggest volcanic eruption of the Holocene era, according to David Keye, but I don't think that that's necessarily the case, because he was citing the Chinese chronicle (which reported that there was a strange double-roll of thunder in February coming from the southwest). Okay, coming from the southwest would be in the direction of, you know...since it's coming from China, just imagine the direction. He also says that there was an eruption of Krakatoa at this time, which he derives from an eyewitness account from a medieval manuscript. There is tree-ring evidence from Siberia indicating that this year began a ten-year period of the worst climate conditions experienced for almost 2000 years.

The year 536: "The sun seems to have lost its light and appears of a bluish colour for almost a whole year". In China, they reported "the stars were lost from view for three months"...a failure of bread in the year 536.

Jason: There was a lot of stuff.

Laura: There was a lot of stuff, yeah, and this comes from the Annals of Ulster, the Annals of Innisfail, Michael the Syrian [Chronicle], the anonymous Syriac Chroniclers, the Zuqnin Chronicles, John Lydus (writing from Constantinople) and Michael the Syrian (extracting from John of Ephesus). And, of course, I found that there was a drought in Peru (which affected the Moche culture)...and then the pestilence began (according to Procopius). Yes?

Jason: I'm just saying we've bypassed...

Pierre: We're getting there.

Laura: Yeah, we're getting there.

Pierre: He's growing up and getting there.

Jason: We've actually bypassed....

Pierre: Fifty years to go!

Jason: We've by-passed Caesar, at this point.

Laura: In 537, just one year after--and it could have been the same year because sometimes these years are just little bit iffy--the Battle of Camlann (according to Mike Baillie, this was a mythical representation of comets in the sky and cometary bombardment) [occurred]. There was also a drought in Mecca (according to 8th and 9th century Arab historians)...

In 538: Pompeopolis (there was an earthquake)...

In the 11th year of Justinian, a great and terrible comet appeared. The great Beirut earthquake and tsunami occurred in the same year.

539: Comet, famine, Vesuvius, Antioch earthquake...

540: Cometary bombardment (according to the Chinese historical record); Gildas reports cometary bombardment up in the northern regions of the U.K.; there was a collapse of the great dam of Mareb in Yemen, the country of Sheba...so that was an interesting year, 540...

541: The plague began in Egypt; there was a comet in Gaul; earthquake occurred in Kyzicus...there was a comet, there was drought, earthquake, earthquake, blah-blah-blah...so I'm getting this from all these different chroniclers...

In 542, the sun appeared at noon day...plague began in the east...

543: Plague in Mesopotamia...

544: Plague in Italy, southern France, Spain...

545: Plague in Persia; famine; plague (Mesopotamia 546)...

547: Tremendous thunder and lightning...

549: Flood in Cilicia; plague in the British territories (according to the Bishop of Llandaff)...

551: Another Beirut earthquake and tsunami; earthquake over the Middle East; "the sea retreats" (John Malalus)...

554: Earthquake in Constantinople; the destruction of Baalbek (now that's interesting...wait till you read the next book and hear about Baalbek--that's very, very interesting)...

555: There's another earthquake in Constantinople and plague...

556: Famine [in] Constantinople, plague, ashes fell from the sky...

557: More plague, earthquakes (Constantinople)...

558: Constantinople (plague )...

559: "fire in the harbor", plague and earthquake (Cilicia and Antioch)...

562: Drought in Constantinople...

Jason: ...well, when you say 'plague'--like in Constantinople the plague was so bad, they were paying people in gold to get rid of the bodies--...

Laura: ...well, yeah. When I...like I said: I'm hitting the high spots of these things, but each one of these events was absolutely, freaking horrendous.

Jason: So it decimated the population...

Laura: The death rate in Constantinople was said to have been something like 70-80% of the population...

Jason: ...hundreds of thousands of people...

Joe: ...all of that happened....you just covered about, what, 200 years there?

Laura: We started in the year 431, and we are, right now, at the year 565. We're barely a hundred years...

Joe: ...so, a hundred-some years...and they were the hundred years that were kind of leading up to the fall of the Roman Empire...but historians say that the Roman Empire fell because of...

Laura: ...barbarians...

Joe: ...barbarians and overextended armies and stuff like that...but they ignore all of this...

Laura: They ignore all of this...

Joe: ...massive upheaval and say...you think that might have had something to do with it??

Jason: ...plague after plague....

Joe: ...no-o-o...

Jason: ...famine, pestilence....

Laura: ...so five...let me finish here...now, 565: there was another comet; 566: another comet; 570: an earthquake between Edessa and Samma Satta; plague and famine in Yemen; bombardment of stones from the sky; 574: earthquake; 577: famine and cometary bombardment...

And, then, guess what?

Joe: Nothing.

Laura: The records . . . . go . . . . silent.

Even though...

Joe: ...'cause the records got hit by a comet...

Laura: ...even though it is said that several of these chroniclers lived past this event. Notice we're at 577...and we've got John Malalus [who] lived to 578; Cassiodorus lived to 585; John Lydus lived to 565; Procopius lived to 565; Jordanus, 560; John of Ephesus, 588; Pseudo-Zechariah, at least to 588; Agathias, 582 (Agathias experienced the plague himself...lost most of his family); Evagrius Scholasticus, 593; Menander Protector, 582...

So did all of these people just stop writing? They didn't. What we are told is that their chronicles cease. And it just happens to be that they all, kind of, cease in the same 3-4-5-(maybe 10)-year period.

Pierre: ...around 580...

Laura: 577.

Pierre: ...yeah, the chronicles...all those chroniclers stop chronicling...and, at the same time, a new chronicler...

Laura: (chuckling) ...well...you just...you just...back off here Pierre, you just back off here...'cause we gotta introduce this problem...properly. [laughter]

Jason: ...yeah, could we get the Cliff Notes? 'cause...

Laura: ...no, you're not gonna get the Cliff Notes...I am not going to be thwarted!

In any event, the chronicle picks up in 591: "Eclipse of the sun, violent earthquake, plague in Constantinople, blazing drought, aphids" (you know, small parasitic insects); "plague on the land, solar eclipse, drought" (blah-blah-blah)... so, we have from 577 to 591...and I was thinking, "...well, things must have been peaceful, finally, thank God..." (Everything quieted down.)

Pierre: Fourteen years gap...

Laura: Yeah! So, I'm thinking, well, hallelujah! They were all having a good time, then...everything was, you know...

Jason: ...hunky-dory...

Laura: ...hunky-dory. And then...you know, it must have been over--everything was over. So, then I had this brilliant idea.

Well, I had read Gregory of Tours many years ago. It's a very entertaining book--I highly recommend it. You'll laugh out loud! And I remembered that he wrote about some odd atmospheric and climatological things that kind of stuck in my head, because I thought to myself, "well, that's a peculiar thing to describe"...you know, because this was years before I was even involved in any of this kind of research. But I remembered it! So, I said, okay--so there is a western chronicler who survived. I wonder if he observed any of the same things that the eastern chroniclers observed. Did he observe them from a different perspective? After all, he's over there; he's in Tours...and they're [the other chroniclers] over here, but things are supposedly happening way up in the sky. If I could get another witness, for some of these events (who saw the same things....basically, I'm looking for an independent witness), then that would say that the historians are wrong when they say that these are hyperbole or metaphors (because here's Gregory of Tours seeing the same thing from over there, from his perspective on the other side of the empire). This was my plan!

So, I was going to go through Gregory of Tours and extract all of the same kind of information. Now, naturally, since I had, in creating this table--as I went along, year by year, I had all these cells--, I would put the year in, and then I would write the event down; and if I came to an event that belonged in a year that I had already covered, I would scroll back up, and put it in the proper year. If I came across an event that I hadn't yet had an event for that year yet, I would do a "create new cell" or "create new row", and enter it in.

So, it was just, basically, using, kind of like, a column table. So, now, what I proposed to do, was to divide my descriptive column in two: I was going to have eastern chroniclers in one column; and the western chronicle, which was Gregory of Tours, basically, in the right-hand column. And then, of course, there was going to be this little, tiny column all along the left side that gave the year of the event.

Now, interestingly, I was in the process of doing income taxes at this particular moment in time. And, income taxes, as you know, involves columns of numbers. You have income on one side, and you have outgo on the other side. Interestingly enough, I was also being audited by the French FISC (who were accusing me of money laundering, or getting money from strange places, or doing all kinds of weird things, like asking me where's my yacht? Where are my jewels, my furs, my Ferrari? All that kind of stuff...which was really, totally ridiculous!) So, I started thinking about, you know....and they would ask me for proof of where our funds came from. And I would take them the bank records and say, "here's the bank records--it shows everything that comes in and goes out" (and what goes out kind of equals what comes in...sometimes it's a little more than what comes in, so we're kind of on the edge of being broke, but there's nothing weird going on here!)...

I was thinking about it...and I was thinking, you know...I know that there are people who do that kind of thing. I was trying to figure out how they did it. If somebody was trying to conceal money, how in the world would they do it? It didn't seem to me to be possible, because you have money that comes in, and then you have money that goes out. But still, that question was, kind of, in my mind at the time I started with my Gregory of Tours project. And I believed that I was going to have to do a few row entries, that there were going to be matching, or overlapping, or inter-mixing entries in my data base...

Now, I want you to draw--right now, if you've got a piece of paper and a pencil--draw on this piece of paper [with] the pencil, a square box. Divide it into three columns, you know, a little skinny one on the left for the years. And then imagine that there's all these different rows with events listed in them. There are the first....uh, how many years did we....there's like maybe 50 or sixty rows where there are entries in the left column (not the year column, but in the left column of eastern empire)...and, then on the right column, we're going to put Gregory of Tours. Okay?

So, like I said, I figured I was going to have to make entries. But, I also figured I was going to be able to find matching events (where I didn't have to enter a year). But, then you know what happened? When I got to 577, when all of the eastern chroniclers works were "lost" (this is what we're told: "their works were lost"; "the last part of the chronicle didn't survive"; "we assume he was still alive until this year, but there doesn't appear to be any further writing"; "he breaks off in mid-sentence, and so he must have died"--these are the various explanations given for why all these chronicles cease.) And what I started doing was [this]: "add row"..."add row"..."add row"..."add row"..."add row"...because, remember, I'd stopped at 577 (and then the next row began with 591), so I add row-add row-add row- add row-add row, until...guess what?? I had completely filled in the gap. That is, on the right-hand column, where Gregory of Tours' entries were being entered, it had completely filled in the gap between 577 and 591.

That means that there was now a big empty space in my left-hand column where the chroniclers had stopped writing and then started writing again. And, on the right-hand column, where Gregory of Tours was, there was his first entry to his last entry (first entry began where the left-hand column had ended, and his last entry ended where the next entry in the left column began). I sat there, and I looked at that...and I got this really funny feeling {because, of course, you know, I was thinking, "Well, if he had books that record monetary transactions; and [if] you find that kind of gap in a bank record (that everything is going along, blah-blah-blah...and then, all of a sudden, money is no longer appearing for a certain period time); and then if you were, say, a FISC agent (or an IRS person, or some kind of forensic accountant), and you found a bank account that had money going into it that exactly fit into that gap of the first bank account, you would say, 'Okay, somebody is moving money...they're hiding money....they're transferring money'."(because I was thinking about it in terms of accounting); in other words, it's like, where's the money???}

And there's the money: somebody has transferred something from somewhere else to another account. I saw Gregory of Tours as being an "account". And all of the other chroniclers were an "account". Somebody had moved stuff completely from the eastern chronicles [column] into [the] Gregory of Tours [column], and that's where it was. Well, that gave me a really funny feeling, because you don't expect to find something like that when you're searching through history. And the only reason I found it was because of the specific types of information I was looking for (because, certainly, there were chronicle accounts of other events: political, religious, etc., from other sources that overlapped, or that had been created later--for example, our later sources from after 600, 700; they kind of filled in the history of those gap years with religious and political events: "this happened"; "the church at Ephesus"; "the bishop this"; "there was a martyr"; "they had a synod"; "they agreed on rules"; "the emperor did this"; "the emperor did that"; and so on and so forth). But [there was] not a single, freaking, environmental or celestial event in that whole gap period!

And Gregory of Tours (the period of time that he covers) just happens to have, exactly, all the way through, these environmental and celestial events.

So I said to myself, "Self, something is very funny about this picture." So I wrote to a famous historian, who is a university professor in the United States--I believe he's at Harvard (I'm not going to give his name). I said, "Look at this table--tell me what you think." He wrote back to me the next day, and he said, "I see the problem--I don't know what to tell you. Good luck."

Joe: He's probably come across many things like that, and that's his attitude. You know, like most historians, it's like, "well..."

Laura: I doubt that he's ever come across anything like that. Because nobody...I don't think...

Joe: ...nothing as blatant...

Laura: ...I don't think anybody has ever seen so blatant a piece of evidence of the manipulation of the historical material. Because that is what it is: somebody took material from the chronicles that they claimed did not exist, or had ended, destroyed the copies, and put that material into Gregory of Tours' [account]. Now what does that say about Gregory of Tours? Was Gregory of Tours real?

Joe: Yeah. The question is, why not just destroy it? Why move it, and leave it in place?

Laura: Well, I think the reason was [this]: first of all, Gregory of Tours was the historian of the Franks, supposedly; Gregory of Tours was supposed to give them a sort of legitimacy (his chronicle was supposed to be kind of a legitimate one--it was supposed to be written back during this time, this particular period of time, when all of these things were going on); and, in order to make it look like other chronicles of the time, or similar, the events were taken from these other chronicles and scattered though his, you know (they were given to the right year, but they were scattered through there because they didn't want his chronicle to seem different from the other kinds of chronicles)...

Joe: ...or to have a gap.

Laura: Yeah.

Joe: ...better to have something going on than nothing going on, right?

Laura: Yeah, because, all the while, like I said, they've got the other chronicles filled in with religious events, political events, this kind of thing, and similar things. They've got other things, other chronicles written where supposedly absolutely nothing unusual was going on: this person was writing letters; he was having dinners; he was doing this; he was doing that; and nothing unusual was going on at all. But, the fact [is] that this collection of events--specifically, weather related, flood related, earthquake, and most of all, fire in the sky, fire from heaven, destruction of cities and so forth--was given to Gregory of Tours ([in effect,] moved to France, when it probably never happened in France that way, because, probably, by that time, everybody was already dead)...

Pierre: Yeah, it was a major forgery, in the sense that, concerning the late Roman Empire, the only source available in the Western Empire, is Gregory of Tours. So, all the legitimacy drawn by the Carolingians, the Franks, the new dynasty, Charlemagne, and so forth,--the sole source of legitimacy, giving the missing link between the Franks, the Carolingians and Roman emperors--was Gregory of Tours. So he played a pivotal political role in the establishment of the ruling dynasty that was going to...

Laura: ...they took over the...

Pierre: ...led western Europe for centuries...

Joe: ...kind of like legitimizing their history...

Pierre: ...exactly...and their roots; their origins...

Laura: ...yeah, and, basically, they hooked up with the--by marriage--with the Empire of Constantinople. They created a new pope, put him down in Rome, pretty much gave themselves total, complete legitimacy based on the work of Gregory of Tours...

Pierre: ...and, probably, this is really getting off topic, but probably this re-writing, the creation of this new history, legitimizing the Franks and the Carolingians, was made a few centuries after this major cataclysm took [place] at the end of the 6th century AD...and the rewriting, the pockets of survivors developing a history that suits their agenda, probably occurred around 800 - 900 AD. So, it means, for at least something like two centuries, in Western...in what was left of the Western Empire, there was no sign of civilization. It was merely survival for the lucky survivors, for the few survivors.

Laura: Stone-age! I mean, at least...and, of course, according to the official story, Gregory of Tours was a historian. He was a bishop of Tours. He lived during the 6th century AD. He was the only chronicler in the Western Roman Empire for the critical time, the end of the 6th century. So, it's not an exaggeration to say that all other historians have based their narratives of the Western Empire on this single source. The problem is, besides what I discovered (by putting, searching for, and putting all the environmental and cosmic events into a table), there are other people who have found problems with Gregory of Tours. You're grinning over there. What's funny?

Joe: I just....no, carry on.

Laura: Are we getting messages from the listeners?

Joe: Well, someone named J.H. Christ sent a message saying, "My child, I thought this show was to be about me. Get on with it, or my Father, who art in heaven shall smote thee good!"

(general laughter)

Laura: J. H. Christ, believe me, we're getting there.

Jason: We're an hour and twenty minutes into there, and I don't think we've mentioned Caesar or Jesus once!

Joe: Well, this is only a preface, so you have to understand.

Laura: You know, we may have to...we may have to do this in two shows, because the information is so important. But in any event, I'm going to be writing about some of the different people who have problems with Gregory of Tours (for example, the names of towns, bridges that didn't exist, or did exist, or should have existed; the use of the word patriarch; and so forth). There is sufficient number of bits of evidence that Gregory of Tours--who gave the Carolingians legitimacy and who then gave legitimacy to the pope at Rome, which then imposed Christianity on the whole western world--was based on a huge, freaking fraud.

Pierre: ...and the discrepancy that they found in Gregory of Tours' writing, the use of words, descriptions of places, buildings, events, suggest strongly that Gregory of Tours' writings were probably written between...around the 11th century AD...

Jason: ...which is where a suspiciously large number of manuscripts start at...

Pierre: ...yeah, it probably coincides with the time when Western Europe started to develop. You have the abbeys...those monks that started to write a history that was highly favourable to the agenda, i.e., legitimizing Christianity, Catholicism, linking them to Rome and St. Peter.

Niall: It also coincided with the return of a favorable climate--this is the Medieval Warm Period.

Laura: Yeah, so what is striking is that all the Eastern Empire's alleged eyewitness accounts dry up completely at 578 AD (the time that John Malalus is supposed to have died) and do not pick up again until 591. However, if John of Ephesus lived until 588 and was writing his own accounts of events at that time, and we suspect that those events include astronomical, atmospheric and climatic record, in which he was obviously, furiously interested ([reflected] by the rest of his chronicle), what happened to those accounts?

So, that was...those were the two things that framed my research, as I was going along....and then I came to a most interesting thing: a story. I backed up, and I discovered that the predecessor of Constantine had been an initiate of the Mithraic Mysteries (and so were all his fellow emperors)...and I started thinking, "Wait a minute. He was into the Mithraic Mysteries; he came out of retirement (this is Diocletian--or Dee-o-clee-see-oñ, as it's more correctly pronounced) to try to straighten out the mess that Constantine was making. He went to some place a little bit south of modern-day Austria, and he and his fellow co-emperors made a sacrifice to Mithras...and left an altar with their names and the time and the purpose engraved on it, which is now in a museum in Vienna.

And I said to myself, "Wait a minute. What's going on here?" Because this guy Diocletian is a very interesting guy. I'm not going to go into details about that, but this is the thread that I started pulling on that led me to Caesar, interestingly enough. Because I said...Mithras...Mithraic Mysteries...I started looking into the Mithraic Mysteries...and what I wanted to know, first of all, is where did they originate? Where did they come from? It seems that what we know about them comes from Plutarch, where he says, "The power of the pirates has its seed in Cilicia, and, at the outset, it was venturesome and elusive, but it took on confidence and boldness during the Mithridatic Wars because it lent itself to the king's service." So he goes on, and on, and on, talks about these pirates and how they had flutes and stringed instruments and drinking bouts along every coast; seizures of persons of high command; ransoming of captured cities; [and] piratical craft (which were not merely furnished for their peculiar work with sturdy crews, but they also had extravagant gilded sails, purple awnings, and silver doors, as if they were "rioted in their iniquity and plumed themselves upon it").

So, he goes on about how the power extended over the whole of the Mediterranean Sea. (I'm going through my notes here.) And then Pompey was designated as the person to get rid of the pirates. The reason we know that the pirates were the first mention of the mysteries of Mithras is because Plutarch tells us so. He said that they had forts and strong citadels in the Taurus Mountains, and so on and so forth. I thought that this was really strange, that pirates that were put in order by Pompey were described in these terms because, if you then go and read Plutarch's description of Julius Caesar (or his stories of Julius Caesar and his stories of Marc Antony), you will discover that these stories of these revels and flutes and music and actors and the silver doors and purple awnings and golden sails and all this kind of stuff, are the exact same words that he uses, word for word, to describe the activities of Caesar and Mark Antony in relation to Cleopatra...curiously...

...and then you, also, find that all of this stuff goes on in Cilicia (which is what got me going on [this]: what else is going on in Cilicia?)...that's what led me to the study of Stoicism, which was included in the last volume.

Jason: You forgot to mention something important.

Laura: Hmm? What?

Jason: Caesar was kidnapped by Cilician pirates.

Laura: Yes, Caesar was also kidnapped by Cilician pirates while he was on his way to Rhodes to study rhetoric, at the same time that the great Stoic philosopher, Posidonius, was in residence and teaching there. Also, it is said that Pompey knew Posidonius. So...you know, and in...okay, you guys messed me up, actually, because I've got to explain how this comes about...because I had to study Mithraism. It was in the study of Mithraism that I came across the fact that Mithraism was pretty much something that was reserved for men; and it was spread by the Roman armies because everywhere the Roman armies had camps, there were Mithraea.

Joe: ...and even the structure of the societies were along the lines of Roman military structure, or so some people say.

Laura: ...yeah, so, what happened was, the people who study the Mithraic mysteries finally came out with the idea that the figures (the Mithraic mysteries, instead of having Jesus on the cross, or some mandala or something as their central feature, have what's called a tauroctony: it's a scene where a man who is dressed in a very specific way, is killing a bull that has several specific symbols on it)--these symbols are always the same in every Mithraeum.

So, along came a guy, a German scholar, named K. B. Stark, [who] said that the figures in the tauroctony (which in this scene, represented, not characters out of Iranian mythology, but rather a series of stars and constellations; the Mithraic tauroctony was not a pictorial representation of an Iranian myth, as Cumont and his followers claimed it was, but a star map)...Stark's theory was based on the simple fact that the figures that accompany Mithras in the tauroctony, the bull, the scorpion, dog, snake, raven, lion and cup (every one possesses a parallel among the constellations, in particular the group of constellations which are all visible together at certain moments during the year: the bull is Taurus; the scorpion, Scorpio; the dog, Canis Major; the snake, Hydra; the raven, Corvus; the lion, Leo; the cup, Krater; in addition, the star Spica, the Wheat Ear, as the brightest star in Virgo, parallels the ears of wheat which are often shown in the tauroctony growing out of the tip of the bull's tail)...these parallels, argued Stark, can not be coincidental, and the Mithraic tauroctony must have been created in order to represent a group of constellations...

So, a lot of study goes on...and somebody comes up with the idea that these represent the constellations along the celestial equator, not the ecliptic. And, there are also two figures that are always included in this scene: there is a man on the one side with a torch up; and another guy on the other side with a torch down. So, it was figured out that this meant the equinoxes...in other words, it was a star map that was taken at a certain point in time (because the equinox, the equinoxial positions can date it)...

There is...you know, I'm not going to go into the discussion of the ancient nature of this Mithraic mystery, because there are things in it that relate to comets and so on and so forth. We have seven grades of initiation in the Mithraic Mysteries: you have one called the Raven, which is ruled by Mercury; one called the Nymphus, which is ruled by Venus; Miles, the soldier, which is ruled by Mars...and they have symbols: beaker; lamp; bell; veil; diadem; etc....one called the Lion, which is ruled by Jupiter; and finally, skipping through the rest of them, you have one called the Pater, or Father, which is ruled by Saturn...

So Plutarch says that the origin of Mithraism was Cilician pirates encountered by the Roman general, Pompey, in 67 BC. He says that "these pirates offered strange rites of their own at Olympus and celebrated their certain secret rites, among which those of Mithras continue to the present time, having been first instituted by them."

So, how would a bunch of Cilician pirates know anything about astronomy? And that was the question. I went though...I'm not gonna give you all the details, but the fact is that the person who discovered the precession of the equinoxes, and the fact that you can date things, was very closely associated with the Stoics...and then, as I chronicled in the previous volume of Secret History, you can follow that whole history and see that thread running through there, this idea of the precession of the equinoxes...cycles of history, divine fire, cyclical catastrophes related to the behaviour of princes, or politicians, in relation to their people. (That's a very strong thread.) So that is what I was looking at, and I even found a date, because...uh, let me give you the date, because Ulansey, David Ulansey, wrote a really interesting book about this (I would highly recommend his books).

You may want to review the material in the previous volume of Secret History, where I discuss Baillie, Clube, Napier ([and an] examination of how the accurate astronomical knowledge of the ancients was degraded and reinterpreted by the various Greek philosophical schools that emerged following the dark ages...as I wrote there, the beginning of the Greek civilization began after a period of global stress and disruption due to cometary bombardment that brought the Bronze Age world to an end)...

[And you have to keep in mind that the Taurids are called that because they appear to come from the constellation Taurus. And in some time in the past, what came from that constellation may have been far larger and more dramatic than the meteor streams that, in our modern times, seem so benign and decorative. Three or four thousand years ago, the objects emanating from Taurus were not so small and benign. Enormous, brilliant celestial objects would have been seen traveling along the zodiac with attendant fragments, looking like a shepherd with his little fluffy sheep.]

Backtracking still further, tells [us] the giant comet came tens of thousands of years ago, and its initial appearance may have started the last ice age, etc. In the previous discussion, I followed the line of Greek philosophers, and, following the Ionian school and Anaxagoras (it was Anaxagoras who claimed that the sun and moon were earthly bodies, and so on and so forth)...but, anyhow, I brought this study of philosophers down to Posidonius, and it's with Posidonius that we connect with Julius Caesar...and it's with Julius Caesar's army and his conquest of Gaul and his travels up along the Rhine River and into Germany and so on, where you find these Mithraea. In other words, Julius Caesar's soldiers probably were initiates in the Mithraic mysteries; and it's probable, even, that Julius Caesar, himself, was a high initiate. (I think I'm going to make some efforts to provide some coincidental, circumstantial evidence that this may have been the case.) I think that the story of Julius Caesar's having been captured by these pirates, in the way that it's described, is just as much a red herring as the story of the pirates described in the exact same terms as Antony and Cleopatra (and Caesar and Cleopatra, and all of the other individuals, because, as it happens, there was a Mithraeum--it was discovered fairly recently--under the palace of Caesar's (Julius Caesar's) heir, Augustus Caesar, in Rome...so there is some pretty strong evidence that this is one of the things that Julius Caesar and his army were into, one of the things that kept Julius Caesar and his army so tightly bound with one another.

This is...and there are strong hints and indications that, if it had not been for Constantine, Mithraism would have been the religion of the Empire. Diocletian, of course, was an initiate of Mithraism, and I suspect that the assassination of Julius Caesar, and the honoring of Julius Caesar, was combined with the Mithraic Mysteries, and the principles and ideas of the Stoics, and it is from that combination that Christianity emerged.

Anyway, this is what I came to think, and I started talking about it here in the house. I said, "You know, I feel a little crazy, because I started reading all of this stuff about Julius Caesar, and the more I read, the more I realized that the life of Julius Caesar, his life, is almost identical, sequentially, and in terms of events, as the life of the so-called Jesus Christ.

Jason: ...or at least the last years.

Laura: No, I'm saying, even his birth. We've got this handy little book that...[on which] some research was done that shows that probably Julius Caesar, was born at a place called Boville--not exactly in Rome. And Boville is like "the place of the ox". At the very least, it is the place where his family origins were located. And then at a certain point in time, when he had started his civil war, Julius Caesar replaced the standards of his army with images of the bull. He got rid of the Roman eagle and he put the bull up.

Pierre: ...and along his life, he sacrificed bulls several times. He wrote a book about astronomy as well. Even during his funeral, the way his body was cremated is quite spectacular. It was this big...

Laura: ...now just wait!! We're gonna do the funeral-we're gonna do the funeral!

Joe: I could give you a broad overview of Julius Caesar's life in five sentences.

Laura: Okay.

Joe: ...of what he, you know, of what you could sum it up as...

Laura: Give us the overview.

Joe: He was a great and just man, who stands his age by instituting a comprehensive policy of forgiveness. On the verge of becoming a king, he is betrayed and murdered by those he had saved, the treachery epitomized by his turncoat friend. When his tribulation begins, his close friend and religious deputy, sworn to protect him, flees in fear and disguises himself. The murdered man's ultimate triumph is being resurrected as a god. And then his betrayer commits suicide.

That's the general outline of Caesar's life, and, hang on a minute! I've heard that before!

Jason: (whispered) ...that sounds.....oh, my god....

Laura: Yeah...

Joe: ...damn, where is that?

Pierre: The whole structure of the life; you have the...we don't talk about Jesus or Caesar specifically, but imagine a character, a human being, that is born from a very famous lineage, but born in a poor family, who starts a quest to defy the ruling elites, to reduce oppression, to serve people, perform miraculous deeds, who would be betrayed, who will be killed, and who would resurrect. The structure of the life of Jesus Christ followed this script, but also, which is not so known...so well-known...the structure of the life of Julius Caesar exactly follows this path....'cause one of the problems is....

Joe: That's what I just read out, basically...

Pierre: ...one of the problems of the official history is that it depicts Julius Caesar as a bloody despot, as someone who killed millions and millions of people...someone who spent his life waging war, but actually, when you look at the details, at the life of Julius Caesar, you realize that the main value he defended all along...his life and the sole objective he was pursuing...all along his life, [he] was [trying] to establish a new world, where people would be treated justly...and the values he was serving, were above all...above his own life...it was honor and mercy, systematically...

Jason: Clementius...

Pierre: ...Clementius Caesar...yes. ..

Jason: ...the opening page of Suetonius' biography of his The Twelve Caesars (or whatever it is)... the first thing he says about Caesar is his refusal to divorce Cornelia at the request of Sulla. He defies Sulla, who he hates anyway (because Sulla has killed and murdered all these people). Sulla was the dictator that everyone claimed that Caesar was, obviously...and him fleeing and hiding in caves to escape him...that's how the story of Caesar starts...like, one of the first things that you learn about Caesar, is when he is probably about eighteen (at this point, 18 / 19): he's eighteen at this point--from that time on, this is where we get the story...and it's one story after another of him resisting the established authorities (the dictators of the time, the corrupt aristocracy)...I mean...people, when they talk about the Roman Senate, it's not like the Senate today...back then, it was basically an aristocracy...

Laura: ...an oligarchy...

Jason: ...it was an oligarchy of aristocrats (they were all nobles)....

Joe: I beg to differ about it being different today...it was....

Laura: It was, actually...exactly like it is today...

Jason: ...well, no, these people were all like, descended from noble families...and their right to rule, and their position in the Senate, was dictated pretty much by the fact that they were patrician families...that they were, you know, these sort of noble people...

Pierre: ...I think the big difference between Caesar's time and today is [that it is] not really the Senate that is not quite the same. It's just today...there's no more Caesar. This being said, what is difficult to reconcile is how Caesar, who killed millions of people (from his own account--he says so)...how can he be this model of mercy? And to understand that, we have to understand the context and what happened before Caesar. Until Caesar, all winners had all the rights...and the one who had lost...and they were exercising, systematically, this right...it means...the ones who lost were being killed, raped, tortured, [inaudible], the children, the family, the wives...everything was destroyed....

And for the first time in history, you had a man with tremendous power, tremendous legions, who showed mercy...again...and again...and again...and again...

Jason: ...in every single case.

Pierre: ...and most of the time, he was being betrayed (and in some cases...even showed mercy twice)...he was betrayed, and he showed mercy again to the one who had already betrayed him. It was a revolution, really...

Jason: It was a total philosophical--and even somewhat spiritual--revolution with Caesar. And the Gallic Wars did not take place in a vacuum: it wasn't like he walked into Gaul, [and] everything was completely hunky-dory (people were just flaffing around, throwing flowers around, free love everywhere), and he just started cutting people up. That's not what happened--that's not what Gaul was like at that time. So this whole..."he killed a million people"...he went in there, and almost every single engagement...and every single time, he said "Don't do that." And then they did it...and then he said, "If you do that, I'm going to stop you." He always gave them a chance to surrender. When he had won, if they surrendered, he showed them clemency. And most of the time, it was like, "Don't do it again." And they would get together and do it. So it didn't take place in a vacuum (that's one

thing)...people say, "Oh, he killed a million people" in this gigantic campaign, but that wasn't taking place in a vacuum...

Laura: ...well, let me just say that as I went deeper into the study of Julius Caesar, looking for any kind of evidence that he could possibly have been an initiate of the mysteries of Mithras...I came across a book of Stefan Weinstock['s] called Divus Julius (it's there...where he chronicles the life of Julius Caesar with the epigraphic, numismatic, and monumental evidence)...

Jason: ...numismatic meaning coins...

Laura: ...yeah, that gave me the realization that the life...I mean, from the time he crossed the Rubicon until he had his triumphal entry into Rome...every single thing he did...and even including his birth and his upbringing and his introduction of the concepts of mercy and so on and so forth...just reminded me of......you know, I kept thinking, "My god, this sounds like Jesus Christ." And when the author, Stefan Weinstock...when he talks about how...when Caesar was approaching Rome, how all the people came out from all the countryside and all the towns and villages...and they lined the way that he was traveling. They threw flowers at him, and branches in the roadway: "Hail, Caesar! Hail, Caesar! Hail, Caesar!" I mean, it was just like the whole triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. Of course, we all know that just a few days after his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, Jesus was brought up on trial and, supposedly, betrayed and crucified...

Well, it took a little longer for Caesar, but there were other things involved there...but, anyway, Weinstock makes a remark--he says, well, there is other precedent for this type of event, this triumphal entry. (It's Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem.) Well, supposedly, Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem (that followed this same model,) was like, you know, sixty years...or almost a hundred years later!

Joe: ...and that's not a precedent--it came afterwards.

Laura: ...yeah, it came after...

Joe: ...so the answer to our question at the beginning of the show...although we're not going to finish here necessarily...but, the answer to our question at the beginning of the show, "Who was on first?" Well, the historical record shows that Caesar was on first.

Joe: They argue....so people aren't....the problem is that people aren't aware of these details of Caesar's life. They've been kind of white-washed, or overlooked, and they're not being objective...

Laura: ...and if you watch movies about Caesar, I mean, they depict him like some kind of power-mad, ambitious.... and the thing was, if you read carefully, and you read the sources, you see. And remember, all the sources writing about Caesar were hostile sources. They were members of the ruling elite, the oligarchy. And he came in and messed up their sandbox, and took their toys away. [He] gave land to the soldiers, gave land to the poor people. In his will he left a bequest to every single resident of Rome, for crying all night!

Pierre: Three hundred sesterces to each citizen.

Laura: Yeah! Well, anyway, it started making me feel a little crazy to be thinking this, you know. I mean, Jesus Christ was Caesar?? And I started talking about it a little bit, and I started reading the excerpts, and saying "well, that's just like Jesus, that's just like Jesus." I would bring 'em down, I'd come down to breakfast with my latest research, and I'd say, "this is just freaking me out...this is just freaking me out completely, because it was not something that I ever expected to find." Then I talked about it a little bit (when we were traveling a month or so ago with some members of our research forum). Even at that point, you know, I was still feeling a little crazy. I was just kinda trying it out, to see, you know, does this sound all that crazy?

Then it was, o-ohhh....not too long ago, that Pierre decided to see if anybody else had ever thought of this, so he put some kind of text in Google and searched...and he discovered this interesting guy, Francesco Carotta. Well, Francesco Carotta has the whole thing worked out. As far as I'm concerned, with his evidence based on how the texts were morphed, and how they changed over time, it's clear that the gospel stories, at least the earliest gospel story, the Book of Mark, is about Julius Caesar. It's clear how the text emendations were made, or the copying errors, or the changes, or how they used abbreviations, and so forth. Maybe Pierre wants to give us a quick run-down on that, because I felt a little less crazy to know that I wasn't the first person who had thought of this.

Pierre: Yeah, basically Carotta compared, mostly, the first gospel, Mark, to the life of Julius Caesar...and he discovered that for, not some points, not most of the points, but for every point, the structure, the requisite, i.e. the content, and in most cases, the names were the same (apart from concerning the name, apart from some translation mistakes).

Just one example: the beginning of the journey of Caesar, begin[ing] in Ravenna, marching towards Rome, to bring peace...marching towards the Senate...or, in parallel, Jesus, from Nazaraea, and crossing the Jordan, etc. (the beginning of their journey).

So, on the one side, you have Julius Caesar. On the other side, you have Jesus Christ. Julius - Jesus.

Julius was called Pontifex Maximus--he was a high priest (but, in Greek, it's Archas Magistos)..."Istos" - "Christos"...so, you have Julius Caesar - Jesus Christos.

They both come from a land: Ravenna - Nazaraea (the city/town)...from a land: Gallia - Gaul (in Latin) for Caesar; Galilea for Jesus Christ...they both cross a river, the Rubicon (the Red River); the Jordan (because in the Red Sea)...they both go to a land: Iulia ('Italy' in Latin); and Iudea (Judea)...they both reach a first town: Corfinium (for Caesar); Capharnaum (for Jesus).

Okay, there are about seven hundred pages in this book...about five hundred pages...and there are the points basically...all the miracles, all the characters, all the structure, are so similar, that it cannot be due to coincidence...basically, The Bible...and the New Testament / The Gospels are a very close adaptation (inspired, or copied from Julius Caesar's life)...

Jason: ...don't think the similarities are just those...

Laura: ...there's many, many more...

Pierre: Thousands.

Joe: The problem is that...anybody, just looking at it objectively...you have all of this historical evidence for Julius Caesar (his life, the details of his life, what he did), and he did it first...and then you have this person called Jesus Christ (for whom there is no historical evidence and no evidence that he did any of the things), but all of the things that he did exactly mirror, or, very closely mirror, what Julius Caesar is known to have done...

Jason: ...and you have this situation....

Joe: ...and not only that, but the details in the gospels of Jesus' life are all completely contradictory, and make no sense, whatsoever...so, just look at it from that point of view...and you say, "well, this second one that came along, afterwards, has got to be just a made-up piece of bull-shit that somebody copied from the life of Julius Caesar (that we know actually happened)"...

Laura: ...well, the thing is...what I think happened is when you...because, for me, the most profoundly moving part of the story of Julius Caesar is the story of his funeral...which is, as it turns out, the exact model on which the so-called 'Passion of Christ' has been created. It follows exactly, even to the image of, the wax image of Julius being raised up on a cross-like object (so that all of the people who are listening to Marc Antony's funeral oration, can see it)...and him holding up Caesar's robe at the point of a spear (so that they can see the robe that he was wearing when he was assassinated, with all of the holes and the blood on it)...

Pierre: ...here, maybe we can add a detail...because most biographies...most stories about Caesar relate history from his birth...or from when he was about eighteen-years-old to his death. "And you too, Brutus?" (the assassination) ...and, after, there's less sources...but, if you read the sources that deal with the funeral of Caesar, you discover that...so Caesar was killed. All the Senate flew away, ran away. Then the body was carried by three servants to his wife, Calpernia. Then, there was a ceremony that was organized in the Forum...and during this ceremony, there was a cross that was raised, called a 'tropaeum,' ...and on this cross, you had an effigy, a figure of Caesar (a wax figure of Caesar exhibiting all these wounds...showing what the person, Julius Caesar, [who] was already considered as a god by the Roman citizens...how he had been killed). So, you have a betrayer, Brutus; you have an assassination; and you have a resurrection. You have the same structure. You have the rebirth of a god...

Laura: ...and not only that, but, apparently, according to the contemporaneous account of Virgil, the poet, the signs in the heavens (and the events that were supposedly attached to the death of Jesus Christ), actually, were attached first to the death of Julius Caesar.

He writes:

"The sun will give you signs. Who dare say the Sun is false? He, and no other, warns us when dark uprisings threaten, when treachery and hidden wars are gathering strength. He, and no other, was moved to pity Rome on the day that Caesar died, when he veiled his radiance in gloom and darkness, and a godless age feared everlasting night. In this hour, Earth, also, and the plains of Ocean, ill-boding dogs and birds that spell mischief, sent signs which heralded disaster. How oft before our eyes did Aetna deluge the fields of the Cyclops with a torrent from her burst furnaces, hurling thereon balls of fire and molten rocks? Germany heard the noise of battle sweep across the sky and, event without precedent, the Alps rocked with earthquakes. A voice boomed through the silent groves for all to hear, a deafening sound, and phantoms of unearthly pallor were seen in the falling darkness. Horror beyond words: rivers stood still, the earth gaped open. In the temples, ivory images wept for grief, and beads of sweat covered bronze statues. King of waterways, the Po, swept whole forests along in the swirl of his frenzied current, carrying with him, over the plain, cattle and stalls alike. Nor in that same hour did sinister filaments cease to appear in ominous entrails, or blood to flow from wells, or our hillside towns to echo all night long with the howl of wolves. Never fell more lightning from a cloudless sky; never was comets' alarming glare so often seen."

Pierre: ...and, maybe, we can mention at this point, Caesar's comet...

Caesar was assassinated on the 15th of March...and, interestingly, on the 15th of March, Jesus Christ was killed as well (according to the Gospels). So, in 44 BC (July), three months after the assassination...in July, during the month when Caesar was born...were organized, for the first time, games in honor of Caesar. During those games, at the end of July, between the 20th and the 30th of July, 44 BC (during those games, for seven days in a row), a comet was seen, high in the sky...and this comet is not an exaggeration. It's not imagination. It was observed all around the world, by Chinese observers in particular...and this comet (the magnitude was -4, it was as bright as the half-moon)...it was the brightest comet ever observed in recorded history.

Joe: ...yup...

Laura: ...so, there is all of the elements there together...and there's another little book that I think is really brilliant. It's called Et tu, Brutus? Then Fall Jesus by Gary Courtney. It seems that somebody else had the same idea, just slightly before...well, he didn't have the idea before Carotta, but he published before Carotta (because his book was published first in 1992, and I believe that Carotta was still working on his manuscript at that time). In any event, this Gary Courtney has written a brilliant little book, I mean, probably one of the best condensations of the mountains of biblical research that I have read over the years...the [most] authentic work ever seen. It's just...it's really brilliant. He's written it for the lay audience...it's not even a very big book--it's only, uh...

Joe: ...one hundred and sixty-two...

Laura: ...yeah, a hundred and sixty-two pages...but he condenses biblical research into that hundred and sixty-two pages and makes the case...and makes the case!!

Joe: ...yeah, you won't be able to read that book and ever believe that the gospels are anything other than a pure fabrication...

Jason: ...shoddy fabrication. It's embarrassing...

Laura: ...well, the thing is...let's be clear...it's not a fabrication (because the story of Jesus is really the story of Julius Caesar)...and there were textual mistakes, translation errors that Carotta has documented...that show how the transition was made...and my thought is [this]: because of the wild outpouring of grief that fell upon Rome during Caesar's funeral [this tremendous event, this passion play that was staged for the first time...when he was actually lying there dead on his funeral bier (before they cremated his body)] , that the soldiers of Caesar (the ten's and twenties of thousands of soldiers who loved Caesar; who were then at that time--and had been for several years--being resettled all over the empire by being given land and founding towns and colonies--which was Caesar's gift to his army, which was the thing that Caesar had fought for all his life: to be able to give land to people who deserved it; to people who were hard-working; to people who fought for the Empire; to the poor, the dispossessed); that these soldiers [(these people, most of whom were also initiates in the Mithraic mysteries, took the passion of Jesus and turned it into a passion play; that they then performed, or commemorated, every year, or as often was necessary)] included it with all of their Mithraic gatherings all over the empire; and, at some point, somebody wrote down the whole sequence (and that became the foundation for the Book of Mark--it was a passion play)...this explains perfectly, as Gary Courtney points...this explains perfectly why it is written that way (why it sounds so strange and disjointed, and why there are these leaps...it's because each part of the Gospel of Mark is a scene that's being played in a passion play), then, over time....

Joe: ...obviously the original Mithraic enactment of that play would not have been the same as....

Laura: ...no, well...

Joe: ...it was twisted and turned into the gospels...

Jason: ...well, kind of...

Joe: The Gospel of Mark.

Laura: ...well, we don't know that.....well, what I'm saying is that this is what they were doing, okay? There was a large contingent of Jews present at the funeral of Caesar...and the historians note (I mean, Plutarch and Appian), that the Jews cried the longest. They came back, night after night, to the place where the body had been burned, mourning Caesar...and the reason was [this]: Caesar had made many laws and had been very kind to the Jews, very benevolent to them...had given them their own rulership...they had....

Joe: ...he made them citizens...

Laura: ...gave them citizenship, exempted them from all kinds of onerous treatment...and, basically, I would say that there were many members of his army, or of other armies, who were Jewish, who were also initiates of the Mithraic mysteries, because...you have to understand, a mystery school was more...kind of, like a man's club: they had certain other things going on
(which I'm going to get into in my next volume); but, I think that they used the example of Caesar [they recreated the passion of Caesar, how he was betrayed, and died, and used Caesar as their model for behavior (he was a...he was not a wimpy guy who just came along and said 'oh, just turn the other cheek'; and 'there's a better world waiting for the meek', and that sort of thing; he was a powerful person who actually did things to right wrongs and make things right for other people)]...

So they were engaged in this activity. And they were engaged in it even in Judea...and I would say that it was this activity [this combination of Mithraic mysteries; Stoic things; a militant Judaism, itself (that turned into the Jewish resistance movement against Rome)], this came about during the Flavian period (the Flavians then probably...or after the time of the Flavians), then there were additional gospels that were created and re-worked, using material from Josephus, twisting and distorting things, adding stuff, adding some philosophy, adding this, adding the other thing. Names were changed, and even the names of the rebel leaders that are mentioned in Josephus' Wars of the Jews, become disciples of this Jesus of Nazareth. So, the Flavians put the whole set of events back to 30 AD, gave the individual a name, 'Jesus', 'Jesus Christ', and it's probable that Julius Caesar, himself, was called 'Christ' in all of these passion plays up to this time, anyway...so, they were able to slide this in without anybody really noticing anything...

Jason: ...well, I would point out that there's a precedent: when Romulus was named a god, his name was changed, too. He was given a different name. They didn't refer to him as Romulus anymore. It was 'Quirinus'...

Laura: ...so it was normal for Caesar to be called.....

Jason: ...they wouldn't have called him 'Julius Caesar'...they would have called him something else...

Joe: ...what you're saying is that the Jews, then, as the New Testament of the Gospels were written, the Jews who were very...who supported Caesar and essentially loved him because of what he had done for them...it was turned around...and that, obviously, as has come down to us today, it's the Jews that called for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ...

Laura: ...the Flavians, of course, turned it around on them, because they had this big problem:
they had these Judean rebels; they had Zealots and Zacharias, etc, etc...these individuals...they had
to control them because they went in there, (and they destroyed Jerusalem to stop this)...because
these absolutely...they were being trained by the example of Caesar (Caesar was absolutely, utterly, inflexible in his will; he cared nothing for his body; he exposed himself to danger continually; he never submitted himself to evil authorities)... I think they were using the example of Julius Caesar in their Christology, in their passion plays, and that this was the cohesiveness that gave these Judean rebels their "oomph," that made them able to launch their rebellion, and to stand against the Romans (the later Roman emperors that came after Caesar, and after the
Julio-Claudian line ceased to exist)...

So, the Flavians had to (or somebody after them had to) edit these texts to use them to pacify people, because they could see that if they allowed this worship of Julius Caesar to continue, this was dangerous. This had to be fixed--it had to be edited (this Julius Caesar, this passion play, everything): he had to be killed on a cross, and he had to be killed by Jews (because, of course, they needed to turn the hatred of the empire against the Jews, also) because they didn't want them setting an example for other people to rise up against the controlling rulers of the time...

Joe: ...absolutely--an example is a dangerous thing...

Pierre: ...and they knew almost nothing about Jesus, but something that was sure...is that he was a descendent of David...his Jewish identity was one of the only things that was certain in this new narrative...so, basically, you had a very inspiring Julius Caesar cult. It's testified. It's shown in Ephesus, in Antioch, Alexandria, and Phillippi, you have what was called the 'Caesarea' (temples dedicated to Caesar), but actually it was more than that: Caesar was not one more god. Caesar, unlike all the other gods, had his statues in every single temple; Jupiter's temple, Diana's temple, Venus' temple. He delivered charisma of integrity, of honor, of mercy. He showed this in life and every instant, in spite of people. Caesar instilled...created monotheism...and from his death...44 BC to around 80 AD, you have the development of this new Caesar cult. It's growing big...and you have nothing about Christianity....and around 80 AD, during the Flavians (Titus, Vespasian, Domitian), you suddenly have...a sudden end of this huge Julius Caesar cult...and the emergence, from nothing...and of the Christian movement, the first mention of Christianity, of Jesus Christ, Nazarea and all.....

Laura: ...that's authentic...

Pierre: ...goes back to authentic, goes back to the historian of the Flavians, i.e., Josephus, Flavius Josephus. He's the first one to mention it. This historian, Josephus, was the official historian of the Flavians. He started to write [and] all his work is about legitimizing the Jewish population. He started writing about this Jesus Christ right after the Jewish Wars.

Laura: Yeah.

Jason: ...that's because the Jews were demonized...and....

Laura: ...yeah, then the first pope, the very first pope, supposedly, after Peter, who, by the way...as this other guy....I really don't like this guy....what's his.....where is that book?

Pierre: Atkins?

Laura: Atwill! Where did Atwill go? We didn't bring it in?

Niall: Here it is.

Laura: ...oh, here's Atwill. Atwill writes a book called Caesar's Messiah - The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus ...well, he's got some points. The guy is real sick puppy, because...you know, he says some things that are absolutely outrageous, but he does notice some things that are very, very damn peculiar, which is [to say]: correspondences between the gospel stories, particularly between the Gospel of Matthew and the works of Josephus. So, it's almost as though, either somebody was writing this gospel based on Josephus, or Josephus, himself, was editing an already existing gospel, to make it say what the Flavians wanted it to say. The whole thing was, of course, you know, [just this]: you've got to get rid of Julius Caesar; you've gotta change the name; you gotta change the location; you've gotta change these battles, these miraculous battles that Caesar won by sheer, freaking force of will; you've gotta change them to miracles--I mean, you know, miracles...

Jason: ...they're really weak-sauce miracles....

Laura: ...and they're really weak-sauce miracles, because if you map Caesar's battles and you map Jesus' miracles--along with the travels--you will see that his miracles exactly correspond to Caesar's battles, and, in some cases, even the word-play is identical...

Jason: ...like 'obsesses' for 'possessed', versus siege...

Pierre: ...and there were two major changes I noticed between the Caesar cult, and the gospels:
A) the identity of the 'Messiah' (who became Jewish); and B) the paradigm (the way of seeing life). Caesar was promising and implementing a paradise on earth for people (He was serving people. He was doing really....and he was achieving major success...that's why he got killed.)

On the other side, the gospel side, you have the creation of this paradise in heaven, that pushed people to accept anything on earth, to finally, actually accept hell on earth, domination, extortion, despotism, [in order] to access, even possibly, this hypothetical paradise in heaven...so...

Laura: In other words, accept the rule of your dominating oligarchy, and you'll get to go to heaven if you believe in Jesus. But for god's sakes, do not believe in Julius Caesar and the things that he did, because that will inspire you to rebel!

Joe: I don't really think they would have wanted... Caesar wouldn't necessarily have wanted anybody to believe in him, in terms of god. I would have thought that he...any lasting testament....

Laura: Well, of course he wouldn't!

Joe: ...testimony he would have said...would have been, "Don't deify me. Follow what I'm trying to say."

Jason: ...yeah, he was...

Laura: ...yeah, "Follow my example". But, I'm just saying....that if people believed in the example of Julius Caesar....

Joe: Exactly.

Laura: ...that a man could, by his will and his righteousness, because Caesar was an extremely righteous man...when he was ordered to divorce his wife for political reasons, he refused. He went on the run. He was a young man. He was - what?--he was eighteen year old? He went on the run. Sulla's army was chasing him, hunting him down. He finally got sick, and he was so sick he couldn't get out of bed, and they found him...and he had to pay them a bribe so they wouldn't kill him...

Joe: Yeah.

Pierre: ...and that's the final treason, actually. Because the main meaning, the main message in Caesar's legacy is standing for higher values (the importance of mercy, of honour, of the word you give, of talking the talk/walking the walk). This example, this highly inspiring example, was expunged from all those values, and replaced with Jesus Christ as we know [him], as Christians...

Laura: Yeah. [sarcastically] Just go meekly to your crucifixion, then you'll rise again and go to heaven!

Jason: ...just to understand how awesome this dude was, back in that day, he fought over three hundred battles...

Pierre: Three hundred and two battles--he lost two.

Jason: ...and he didn't "lose" lose, he had to retreat from two...

Pierre: ...well, he lost one in Dyrrhachium. He lost about nine hundred men...and that was a source of grief...

Laura: ...and he retreated.

Pierre: ...and he lost once in Alexandria. It's one of the miracles actually. He was swimming for miles, hanging one arm up to save some scrolls, some manuscripts...so, he lost twice, but what we have to keep in mind is that for all the other battles, the three hundred other battles, he won. And most of the time he was outnumbered...

So the three hundred battles he won.....

Laura: ...were miracles.

Pierre: ...alot of them were miracles...but really miracle...it's not about changing water into wine, or creating fishes. It was...another stunning thing about Caesar that we've been talking about...are his moral values. There's also the intellect...this skilled genius....

Laura: ...this incredible, brilliant....

Pierre: Usually you have genius in one field, you know? You have a genius in painting. You have a genius in music, in engineering. Caesar was genius in engineering, architecture, creativity, tactics, leadership, psychology, politics, writing; and I forget some, so you want to say?

Laura: Rhetoric!

Jason: I want to say one thing. Julius Caesar invented books. And I am not joking. The man actually invented the book.* And I mean that flabbergasted me. He did all that stuff, AND he had time to invent books. Not that he just wrote them. He invented them and then wrote them.

[*Caesar had sheets of writing material folded in half and sewn into a sort of notebook, as opposed to the more common scrolls of the time. The Gallic Wars were recorded in these prototype notebooks. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex]

Laura: Yeah.

Pierre: ...and, actually, the gospels were, systematically, written in codex, in books, while at the time most of the writings were done on other supports. It's another peculiar coincidence.

Laura: ...yeah, so Christians really are the "people of the book". It depends on who you see as Christ, and if you really understand that Julius Caesar was Christ, it gives a whole new meaning to being a Christian. It gives it, actually, a value that it never had before.

Pierre: Definitely. We could think that...

Joe: ...the strange thing is that the ideas, or the ideology, of Julius Caesar is in Christianity, but the...

Laura: ...watered down....

Joe: ...militant aspect, though...i.e., impose, if you have to, by force of arms...you need to impose this benevolence and clemency and stuff...on the country you live in...and, therefore, if you see a corrupt elite, you gotta get rid of 'em. So the militant aspect of it, i.e., the people are required to follow the example of Julius Caesar (which was to create as much as possible, peace on earth)... and, if you see it not being....if you see it being subverted, corrupted by an elite, you've gotta do something about it, but that part was taken out of it. The whole reward was, like Pierre was saying, projected into heaven afterwards. Just live a quiet, peaceful, good Christian life. A good Christian is someone who doesn't...

Pierre: ...submit.

Joe: ...abide corruption amongst the elite.

Jason: I hated one thing...I can't remember where I read it, but one of the things that Julius Caesar did was that after he got back into Rome after the civil war, he would host these gigantic, massive feasts, feeding all the people, with like twenty-thousand couches or something like that...I mean, he beats Jesus, beats the pants off Jesus, with the feeding of the masses....

Laura: Yeah, talk about loaves and fishes.

Jason: ...Jesus feeds just five thousand. I mean, there's all these kinds of parallels between what he did, and what Jesus did, but he always did it, to be quite honest, better. I mean, Jesus has a handful of miracles like, kind of like, a little bit suspicious. He exorcised some person here, he healed somebody here, got rid of leprosy here...and you know, Julius Caesar spent his entire life giving massive....passing legislation to give massive tracts of land to the poor and disenfranchised...

Laura: Feeding people.

Jason: Feeding people.

Laura: Making people citizens so they had rights.

Jason: Yeah, that was one of the things. When normal...when someone would go into Gaul, or whatever, and conquer, they'd conquer, enslave all the people, take all the booty...where he would go there, and then he would give them autonomy, or give them citizenship...

Joe: ...you know, I just said the word...I used the term I just made up, "impose your benevolence"...

Jason: Impose your benevolence.

Joe: ...so, that sounds quite strange, people...but in a certain sense, that's what Caesar did...and if anybody thinks about today, how would you create peace on earth, leaving aside any navel-gazing or imagining or meditating on it. If you were to do it, try to do it in a practical way, and you were in a position of power, to be able to do...or to try imposing benevolence on the world, like...look around the world, where all of the problems are...people not living peaceably together...how would you do that? And what kind of resistance would you come up against by the current elite? Where would that end up? Would you not have to, if you found yourself in that position, and had to follow that path...and decided it was your mission to follow that path...or you were empowered to do that, do you not imagine you would end up having to go to war against people who...

Jason: ...I mean...the military in Egypt....

Joe: ...it's a problem...how are you going to do it? People want peace on earth. How are you going to do it in the current context today? Caesar tried to do it in the context of his day...

Laura: ...and the context of his day was not that much different from today.

Joe: ...so if you're a position of power, and you're tasked with the job, well, then, you either do it, or you don't...you either go with what's in front of you or you don't.

Pierre: He tried [the] peaceful way for fifteen years. He tried in the Senate to pass laws that were fair, that were smart, that were just. And everybody agreed with that. Cicero, his nemesis, even wrote so...but, systematically, the Senate, the Optimates, the oligarchy, were refusing his laws. They knew it was good, but they refused it because they knew also it would give him credit in the eyes of the people...so, after fifteen years trying the peaceful way, and making major achievements, they were after him. They wanted to impeach him. So, he saw the only solution to prevent the people from suffering from oligarchy, from despotism, from a new Sulla, from years and years of suffering and death, was to get more political legitimacy in the eyes of the Senate...and from... [for] that he had to get military legitimacy...and that's one of the reasons why he went through those campaigns. There are many other reasons....

Joe: ...but, then he had to have....

Pierre: ...but, they were very legitimate. That's one of the reasons.....

Joe: ...but then he had to go to war against the Senate itself....

Pierre: ...but after the civil war...

Jason: ...he knew that Pompey was gonna become the next Sulla. He knew that that was the way it was going, with the Mithradates and the Mithradatic War...

Pierre: ...yeah, what I mean is...I think he realized that he had to go through a lot of deaths, a lot of battles, in order to prevent much more death, and much more suffering...to get the power to create a new world order for the old empire, that would be benevolent...

Laura: (gasps) Oh my god...he said the words.....

Pierre: ...that would be positive for the people. Yeah, he...

Joe: ...it's what we're all about here.

Pierre: ...it's negatively connotated, but it was a new world order....

Laura: ...yeah, because one of the things....

Pierre: ...a positive one. For once!

Jason: One of the things...that was going on...I mean, the Roman Empire, at the time was...and the citizens were crippled by debt. The middle classes were impoverished....

Laura: ...starvation...

Jason: ...and the rich people were super, super rich. I mean it was...

Pierre: ...most were not citizens.

Jason: ...most weren't...

Laura: They had the same thing that we have nowadays: they had these vast estates that were owned by the ultra-rich that they had gotten because they would go off to the provinces and rape, pillage and plunder, to steal the stuff of other people (taxes and stuff); come back, get all this land....they'd been using the Italian people for years and years to be soldiers (then they would come back and they would lose their land and they would be bought up by the rich people). And then, of course, they would bring back tons of slaves from their conquests to work the land (so that the Italian people didn't have jobs). So, they didn't have land, they didn't have jobs, the rich people owned everything. You know, it was the equivalent of the corporatocracy that we live with today: the big corporation; corporate farming; corporate this, corporate that; cutting out artisans and individual people, family farms...and it was exactly the same thing...and then crushing taxes and....

Pierre: Three of the first laws he managed to get enacted were [as follows]: a) the agrarian law, where he distributed massive surface [amounts] of land to families (to poor families); The second law was to grant citizenship to a lot of Roman people who lived in the provinces (because for a long time it was only Rom[an] families [in the city itself] and Rom[an] people who had the rights, who had the privileges)...

Laura: ...and only Rome (families in the city of Rome with a certain amount of money) were allowed to be citizens and have rights...

Pierre: ...and the third law was to make consuls (representatives of the Roman oligarchy) accountable (to stop the abuse that was committed almost systematically by the Roman elite in the provinces, what Laura described a few minutes ago)...so, he was really developing...applying a new model--a new, truly social model...and at the core of this model was the respect for people...

Jason: ...and their rights...and the saddest thing is that Cicero is often credited as being some great orator on the topic of freedom and liberty and the republic...but he was with the Optimates in blocking things like that. He was against giving the people citizenship.

Laura: He was an officious twerp. He was the most despicable human being I have ever read about in my entire life. It's unfortunate that most of what we know about Julius Caesar comes through Cicero.

Pierre: At the same time, it's a blessing. Cicero was an enemy of Caesar. You can be sure that Cicero didn't depict Caesar in a positive light. And despite that, even through Cicero's writing, you can see how exceptional Caesar was. So, from a personal experience, you know, as you might have noticed, I have a slight French accent, so I'm from France, unfortunately. So I come from Gaul. And the Gallic Wars, to me, equates [to] one million of my ancestors being killed by Caesar. That's a lot. So, I started reading about Caesar with a strong negative bias...and I read, and read, and read again...and in the end, my conclusion was this man was, without any doubt to me, the greatest man that ever lived. That is this simple.

Joe: ...okay, well, on that note, we're gonna leave it, because we've run over a little bit, and that's our problem. We may come back to this topic, or we may not...we don't know...depending on if we develop any more thoughts or theories on it. But, if not, Laura will be writing about it in the next volume of her series of books, so, until then...anybody got anything to say?

Laura: I just want to recommend that people read Francesco Carotta's Jesus Was Caesar and Gary Courtney's Et tu, Judas?, Then Fall Jesus. Yeah, and also there are some....oh, there's a wonderful, wonderful book about Caesar: Caesar: Politician & Statesman by Matthias Gelzer...and then there is...it's gonna be hard for you to get...Divus Julius by Stefan Weinstock (It's a pricy book, and it's kind of out of print).

Joe: ...but, those first three are good enough...

Laura: ...but, yeah, if you get that....

Jason: ...get the Courtney book first.

Laura: ...yeah, get the Courtney book and...

Jason: ...it's a really good read.

Laura: ...and there's many other good bios...what's that one biography of Caesar that everybody's been reading?

Joe: Freeman.

Laura: Philip Freeman?

Pierre: Julius Caesar by Freeman

Laura: Julius Caesar by Philip Freeman...very good book...yeah, I would really encourage people...because, if you really want to know...I mean, IF (and I believe it is true--I am convinced by the evidence that Julius Caesar was really the Christ) okay...

Joe: ...but not in the way people think...

Laura: ...not in the way people think...and, for me, it's so exciting to be able to have a real biography of a real historical person who was a real example...who really did good things....

Jason: ...who really turns out to be awesome...

Laura: ...who really turns out to be, as Pierre says, the greatest man who ever lived...not only that, but you can even read his own writings. You can read The Gallic Wars. Now could you imagine the....basically, what I'm saying is that you can read the writings of Christ. You can read his own words. You really can. So, that's all I'm going to say.

Joe: ...okay, well, we'll leave it there then...so, until next week, thanks to all our listeners...sorry to our callers...we weren't taking any calls here (we had a number of calls, but we didn't take any)...so, over and out.......

Comment: Check out part 2 of our discussion about 'Jesus' as Caesar here.

Reader Comments

"Historians and archeologists are adamant that there is no historical evidence for the existence of such a person."

I was always under the impression that the vast majority of historians actually agree that there was a Historical Christ, and that it was his resemblance to the Biblical (mythical) Christ that caused debate.

I listened to your 2hour show and did not here one bit of info about Nag Hammadi find in 45 and the lost gospel of thomas and the 114 sayings of Christ himself.... So trying to match Christ and the new testament to Julias Ceasar story you may have done... but trying to prove that Christ never existed... you did not

Well, what about the Nag Hammadi find? It dates from the 2nd century AD, by which time the fraud of history had already been done and Christianity was well on its way. I think the case was well made for showing that the person around which the new Testament is built was in fact Julius Ceasar. So Christ alias Julius Ceasar did exist. Time to get the books and find out more.

The lost Gospel of Thomas does not state the idea that a man named Jesus Christ, born of a virgin, performer of miracles, betrayed and crucified and declared to be the 'son of god', The lost Gospel of Thomas only shows that Jesus was a enlighted teacher preaching that we all are sons and daugthers of God, and that soul carries on after physical death of our body, nothing in the book is even similar to what is being said...So their is a difference between what the new testament says and Julius Ceasars life and the lost Gospel of Thomas says..These sayings were not altered by Constaintine or the Church and have only to do with people trying to find enlightenment in themselves by understanding what is being told by Christ in his 114 verses. So if you can show me where Julius even proclaimed even some of these verses, than you have a story of a switch of characters.

the incan son of god, the zoroastrian son of god, the last egyptian son of god...... to the victor go the spoils, including the documentation of history. The stories in the old testament were orally passed down through generations of pagans, polytheists, and self made god-kings, then the bible was rewritten in Rome. Why? to establish capitalism, and the rule of law, and to establish the allowance of reason..... versus all the hocus pocus and enslavement that existed during the Roman Empire, and to change the Roman Empire into something better. Christianity is a well designed economic plan. Civilization will outgrow the christian religion along with beliefs of dragons and sun gods, as economy affords education.
[Link]and read "the prince" by machiavelli, then apply his reasoning to global governance...religion is a useful tool, whether they get you to believe it or not, whether you believe you are separate from god, whether you believe that we are all god experiencing ourself...it's all just make-believe!

Actually, just about every archeologist and theologian agrees that there is A LOT OF EVIDENCE that Jesus existed.... whether or not you believe in the miracles, it's absurd to suggest that he did not exist. Furthermore, the fact that many religions have stories about miracles doesn't mean that Yeshua's followers "borrowed" them, it means that just about every society has miraculous stories because such stories EXPLAIN our world, and we are all related. All human life originated in the same area, so old stories passed verbally through the region. Events such as a great flood were told in Egypt and Sumeria before being written in the Bible. Prophecies of a great Messiah/Son of God were passed along verbally. As they say, even a broken clock is right twice a day.

If Yeshua had not existed, then thousands of Christians were murdered by ancient Rome for a fable? NOT highly likely! Would you allow yourself to die an excruciating death for a fable about Batman or Peter Pan? Hundreds of people died swearing they had seen a man come back to life from the dead.

Bobdole writes. "Christianity is a well designed economic plan. " Well, that may be what it sadly has become, especially in the US, where everything is poisoned by vulture capitalism, but the message of Yeshua, to love one another, even enemies, to forgive others and care for the socially marginalized, that God is love, these words will live forever. The bible was supressed for centuries by the Catholic Church (it was illegal to translate the text into English!), then it was mis-translated, but the truth cannot be suppressed. With the internet, everyone has access to the original texts, and multiple translations.

Our universe shows signs of being mathematically programmed, which means God is our Heavenly Computer Programmer. Yeshua was one with God and showed us the Way- a path of peace and nonviolence. This is the message that can turn earth into paradise, if we would turn away from selfishness and turn to harmony with God, nature and fellow man. It's not about following "organized religion", which is corrupt. It's about making contact with our Heavenly Computer Programmer, and accepting God's grace.

Fomenko argues that Pompey and Diocletian are similar characters. By the way, he shows two statues, one of Pompey, one of Diocletian, that are absolutely identical.

Well, if Caesar comes after Pompey, and Constantine comes after Diocletian (scholars don't put them one after the other, I think), maybe we should have a look at the parallels between Caesar and Constantine ? Strangely, the first one is at the origine of a new religion, the second one will make it the religion of an empire. Both seems to have a link with a comet.

Vladimir Melamed and Robert Grishin say in "The Medieval Empire of the israelites" that the medieval knights orders of the Templars or the Teutonic Knights are jewish as the religion of the elite of a worldwide empire centered on Byzantium. They directly take their orders from the emperor, and are ruling the western kings. A similarity with this mithraic cult of the jewish soldiers of the Roman Empire that Laura mentions.

Otherwise known as archetypes, right? Read Freeman's book on Alexander (and his father Phillip) and see the story repeat... the stabbing after the warning, the imperial expansion, the political maneuvering... seems the religions follow the same fractal pattern as well.

Or... another example of history repeating itself, which could just be called the classroom gets reset, the patterns repeat with all the archetypes coming back for another round of fun as we go back to school.... as the song goes, "Whoa, whoa, we gotta go, back to school!" Then the cookie cutter mold comes out and is put into play as the dough gets inserted and the baking commences. School is cool, no?.... back to school.... Grease 2, gotta have some grease!

starting a little over 15 years ago many complete strangers would tell me i looked like george clooney. i was never in much agreement with them but there it was and still happens occasionally to this day. now i was married to my wife Elizabeth who passed away just over 6 years ago. Elizabeth was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer and never started treatment. Elizabeth was on life support for approximately 6 weeks before we choose to terminate her. i would visit her every day and read to her from the Bible (always the same verse John 14:6 ... in my fathers house are many "MANSIONS"). fast forward 5 years and George Clooney has released a film titled The Descendants. if you are not familiar with the film it starts out where george and his family make a decision to terminate his wife who is on life support in a coma and her name is Elizabeth. one of the themes of the movie revolves around a massive estate in Hawaii.

Thanks, team.
Your info on Sulla brings to mind Saul, who figured into the lives of both Jesus and David, through different characters; yet, Christ is linked to David and his Saul (hiding out in caves to escape Saul's wrath, etc.)
Makes me wonder how far back, biblically, the writings had to be made to mesh and what collaboration was created between the Roman Empire and the Jews in order to create this new religion and save the thread along the way from the Old to New Testament.
Compelling stuff, y'all.